THE WAR 
AND THE FUTURE 



JOHN MASE FIELD 




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THE WAR AND THE 
FUTURE 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NSW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO - DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd, 

TORONTO 



THE WAR AND THE 
FUTURE 



JOHN MASEFIELD ' 

Author of "Gallipoli," "The Everlasting Mercy," 
"The Widow in the Bye Street," etc. 



ii3eto gotfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1918 



All rights reserved 



at 






COPYBIGHT, 1918 

By JOHN MASEFIELD 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, July, 1918 



AUG 28 1918 
^CI,A5(J1594 



f 



TO 

THOMAS W. LAMONT 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

St. George and the Dragon i 

A Speech for St. George's Day, April 23rd, 
1918. 

The War and the Future 44 

A Lecture Given in America January-May, 
1918. 



ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON 

A SPEECH FOR ST. GEORGE'S DAY, 
APRIL 23rd, 1918 



THE WAR AND THE 
FUTURE 

ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON 

A Speech for St. George's Day, 
April 2Srd, igi8 

Friends, for a long time I did not know what 
to say to you in this second speaking here. I 
could fill a speech with thanks and praise : thanks 
for the kindness and welcome which has met me 
up and down this land wherever I have gone, 
and praise for the great national effort which 
I have seen in so many places and felt every- 
where. We, who, like you, have had to lay 
by our pleasant ways, and take up hard ones, 
and go up a bitter path to an end men cannot 
see, know how great your sacrifice and your 
effort are. But I could not thank you or praise 
you enough, and even if I could, the best praise 
and thanks are silent. If and when I return 
to England, I will speak your praise. 



a? The War and the Future 

So, casting about for a theme, I thought, that 
today is St. George's Day, the day of the Patron 
Saint of England, and that today, in the far 
past, that great knight of God rode out. In the 
Eastern country, and killed a dragon which had 
been devouring women, and that Englishmen 
had thought that deed a holy, and most beauti- 
ful and manly thing, and had chosen St. George 
from among all saints to be their saint, and had 
taken his banner to be their banner, and called 
upon him, century after century, when they 
went into battle. For they felt that such a man 
lived on after death, and would surely help all 
holy and beautiful and manly men for ever and 
for ever. 

And I thought, too, that on this day, 354 
years ago, the child, William Shakespeare, was 
born. In that old house In Stratford which so 
many of you have gone to see. And that on 
this same day, after he had done his day's 
work, he passed out of this life, into that King- 
dom of England which is In the kindling mind, 
In all Its moments of beauty, and that there he, 
too, lives for ever, to give peace, even as St. 
George gives a sword, to all who call upon him. 

So, thinking these things, all the more keenly, 
because I am far from England, In this sweet 



The War and the Future 3 

season of April, when the apple blossom is 
beginning, I felt that I would talk of England. 
Not of any England of commerce or of history, 
nor of any state called England, but of that 
idea of England for which men are dying, as I 
speak, along 5,000 miles of war. 

I believe that the people of a country build 
up a spirit of that country, build up a soul, 
which never dies, but lingers about the land 
for ever. I believe that every manly and beau- 
tiful and generous and kindling act is eternal, 
and makes that soul still greater and more liv- 
ing, till in the land where manly and kindling 
souls have lived, there is everywhere about the 
earth, present like beauty, like inspiration, this 
living gift of the dead, this soul. And nations 
are only great when they are true to that soul. 
Men can only be great when they are true to the 
best they have imagined. And I believe that in 
times of stress, in national danger, in calamity, 
the soul behind a nation kindles and quickens 
and Is alive and enters Into men, and the men 
of the nation get strength and power from it. 

I believe that that great soul, made by the 
courage and beauty and wisdom of the millions 
of the race, Is the god of the race, to protect 
it and guide it and to lead It Into safety. And 



4 The War and the Future 

men turning to it in time of trouble and calamity 
are helped and guarded by it, and brought out 
of the land of Egypt by it into their pleasant 
heritage. 

Yet nations, like men, sometimes turn away 
from their true selves to follow false selves, and 
to serve false gods. All the old Bible is full 
of stories of a little nation sometimes true, 
sometimes false to its soul, and falling into 
calamity, and then being quickened and helped, 
and returning to the truth and coming to mar- 
vellous things, to the green pastures, where 
goodness and loving kindness follow men all 
the days of their life. 

Understanding is the only thing worth while 
In this life. Art is nothing but complete under- 
standing of something. All writers long to un- 
derstand the spirit of their race. 

Let me say now, that 25 years ago, it 
would have been difficult for an Englishman 
to speak here, about the spirit of England, and 
to claim that It Is something of the spirit of St. 
George, a manly and beautiful spirit, ready to 
help some one weaker, and something of the 
spirit of Shakespeare, a just and tender spirit, 
fond of fun and kindness and of the rough and 
busy life of men. That delicate, shy, gentle. 



The War and the Future 5 

humorous and most manly soul is the soul of 
England. It is in Chaucer, in Shakespeare, in 
Dickens. It is in the old ballads and tales of 
Robin Hood, who stood up for the poor, and 
was merry walking in the green forest. It is 
in the little villages of the land, in the old 
homes, in the churches, in countless old carvings, 
in old bridges, in old tunes, and in the old acts 
of the English, a shy, gentle, humorous and 
most manly soul, that stood up for the poor 
and cared for beauty. No finer thing can be 
said of men than that, that they stood up for 
the poor and cared for beauty; that they cared 
to be just and wise. 

Nearly 300 years ago, the life of England 
suffered a rude change in seven years of civil 
war. The ways of life which had been settled 
for 'kvt generations were suddenly and com- 
pletely changed. There followed a turbulent 
and unsettled century, during which, for reasons 
of party, a foreign king, and line of kings, with 
foreign interests, and foreign methods, came 
into our land. 

And at the same time, something else came 
into our land. Industry and adventure had 
long been virtues of the English; but now the 
two together began to create competitive com- 



6 The War and the Future 

mercialism. And just as competitive commer- 
cialism began, a small clique of corrupt politi- 
cians, gathered under the foreign king, and by 
bribery and iniquity of every kind, seized the 
common lands of the villages of England and 
enclosed them. Until then, the country folk 
in England had shared large tracts of land, so 
that, though they were poor, they still had graz- 
ing for cows and sheep and geese, and wood- 
land for firing. Now by various acts of legal 
robbery these lands were taken from them, and 
they were reduced to an extreme poverty. 
They were forced into a position very like 
slavery. They had no possessions except their 
right hands. There was no St. George to stand 
up for them, nor any Robin Hood, except that 
coarse and bitter truth-teller, William Cobbett. 
They had the choice to be the slaves of the land- 
owners or of the factory-owners, and the great 
mass of the populace ceased to have any share 
of what life offers. The enclosing of the com- 
mons robbed them of leisure and independence, 
the coming of the factories took them from the 
fields and the old communities, and flung them 
into new ones, which were allowed to grow up 
anyhow, without art, without thought, without 
faith or hope or charity, till the face of the land 



The War and the Future 7 

was blackened, and the soul of the land under a 
cloud. 

If you consider the thought and the voices 
of that time, you can see that the soul of the 
land was under a cloud. The thought and the 
voices of that time are things divorced from 
the body of the people. The thought is the 
possession of a few leisured men. It is not 
the joy of a great body of men. The voices 
are the voices of a few men crying in the wil- 
derness that things are evil. 

The thought of that time was the thought of 
Dr. Johnson's Club, and of Joshua Reynolds' 
patrons. The voices are the voices of Wm. 
Blake crying aloud that he would rebuild the 
city of God among those black Satanic mills, 
and of Wm. Wordsworth, who saw that poetry, 
which should be the delight of all, was become 
an unknown tongue to the multitude. And 
later the voices become more passionate and 
wilder and bitterer. They are the voices of 
Byron, who saw the foreign king, that royal 
lunatic, and his drunken but jovial son, and the 
bought-and-sold politicians who ran the country, 
for what they were, and mocked them. And 
the voice of Shelley, who cried to the men of 
England to shake themselves free, and the 



8 The War and the Future 

voice of Carlyle, who saw no hope anywhere 
but in the drill sergeant, and the voice of Rus- 
kin, who saw no hope anywhere but in the 
coming back of St. George. 

There was only one question to those men, 
the-condition-of-England question. Thinking 
men might justly be proud of certain achieve- 
ments in those years, many things were invented, 
many things were thought out, great books were 
written, and the world was charted and navi- 
gated and exploited, but there was no peace in 
that England for the men with souls to be 
saved. 

The machine worked, it did great things, men 
could point to its results, but the great men, the 
seeing men, were unanimous that England was 
not a merry England for rich or poor. It was 
still a land where there was kindness and man- 
liness and a love of life and sport and country. 
But with this, there was an apathy to things 
which were vital and kindling. The nation was 
drunken, and that was looked on with apathy, 
the nation had ceased to care, as It once had 
cared, with a most noble, intense, and pas- 
sionate pride, for things of beauty and of style, 
in life, and art and music and the means of 
living. And this deadness and apathy and stu- 



The War and the Future 9 

pldlty were become even matters of pride to 
some. Then the nation, with all its wealth, was 
an ill-taught, an ill-fed, and an ill-clad nation, 
so that in every city in the land a vast number 
of souls were ignorant, and a vast number of 
bodies had not enough to eat nor enough to put 
on. And the rich, who owned the wealth, had 
lost the old English sense of splendour of Hfe. 
They watched the beggary and the drunkenness 
with apathy. They watched the waste and the 
degradation of genius without lifting a finger. 
One of the most delicate silversmiths of our 
time died of consumption as a seller of cat's 
meat. One of our most delicate lyric poets 
died of consumption as a seller of matches in 
the street. Not all the efforts of all the writers 
of England could get a theatre for the fit and 
frequent playing of Shakespeare. Not all the 
wealth nor all the industry could reduce the 
paupers of England, the men and women who 
could not make a living, to less than a mil- 
lion in the year. 

So that, early in 19 14, England was a 
troubled and yet an apathetic country, with 
small minorities breaking their hearts and some- 
times people's windows in an effort to bring 
about a change, and with a vast, powerful, un- 



lO The War and the Future 

thinking selfish weight of prejudice and priv- 
ilege keeping things in the old ruts and the old 
grooves laid down by the foreign king a cen- 
tury and a half before. 

And yet, with it all, there was immense virtue 
in the land. Work was well done. English 
goods were well made. And we were not 
afraid to let any nation compete with us in the 
open market. The nations could sell their 
goods In our markets on equal terms. We had 
no quarrel with any one. We wished to show 
that we had no quarrel with any one. During 
the years before the war, we increased our 
Navy, so that no enemy should attack us with 
impunity, but we reduced our tiny army by some 
divisions, and our auxiliary army by an army 
corps. 

People say now that we were wrong. We 
may have been. At any rate, we did the gen- 
erous thing, and I don't know that the gen- 
erous thing is ever wrong. And in any case, 
we have paid the price. 

In the first week of July, 19 14, I was In an 
old house In Berkshire, a house built eight 
centuries before by the monks, as a place of 
rest and contemplation and beauty. I had 
never seen England so beautiful as then, and a 



The War and the Future il 

little company of lovely friends was there. 
Rupert Brooke was one of them, and we read 
poems in that old haunt of beauty, and wan- 
dered on the Downs. I remember saying that 
the Austro-Serbian business might cause a Eu- 
ropean war, in which we might be involved, but 
the others did not think this likely; they 
laughed. 

Then came more anxious days, and then a 
week of terror, and then good-bye to that old 
life, and my old home in Berkshire was a billet 
for cavalry, and their chargers drank at the 
moat. I saw them there. And the next time 
I saw them they were in Gallipoli, lying in rank 
in the sand under Chocolate Hill, and Rupert 
was in his grave in Skyros. 

We were at war. We were at war with the 
greatest military power in the world. We had 
an army of about 180,000 men, scattered all 
over the world, to pit against an army of five 
or six millions of men, already concentrated. 
We had, suddenly, at a day's notice, with the 
knife at our throats, to make an army of six 
or seven million of men, and we had perhaps 
trained officers enough for an army of 300,000. 
We had to enlist, house, tent, train and officer 
that army. We had to buy its horses and 



12 The War and the Future 

mules, build Its cars and wagons and travelling 
kitchens. We had to make its uniforms and 
straps, blankets, boots and knapsacks; and, 
worst of all, we had to make its weapons. 

We had the plant for making (I suppose) 50 
big guns and 500 machine guns and 50,000 
rifles in the year, with proportionate ammuni- 
tion. Suddenly we wanted 50,000 big guns, 
and 500,000 machine guns and 10,000,000 
rifles with unlimited ammunition, more ammu- 
nition than men could dream of, with all sorts 
of new kinds of ammunition, bombs, hand- 
grenades, aerial torpedoes, or flying pigs, flying 
pineapples, egg-bombs, hairbrush-bombs, Mills 
bombs, trench mortar bombs, such as men had 
never used. And those things were wanted in 
a desperate hurry and we had the plant for not 
one-fiftieth part of them, nor the workmen to 
use the plant when made, nor the workmen to 
make the plant. 

It is said that It takes one year to make the 
plant for the making of the modern big gun, 
and to train the workmen to make the countless 
delicate machines with which men kill each other 
in modern war. That was the proposition we 
were up against, and meanwhile, just across the 
water, well within earshot of our eastern coun- 



The War and the Future 13 

ties, the enemy, like an armed burglar, was 
breaking Into our neighbours' house, and killing 
our neighbours' children, taking his goods, abus- 
ing his women and burning the house over the 
victims. 

In the first eight days of the war we sent two- 
thirds of our Httle army to France (about 
120,000 men all told). They marched up to 
take position, singing, " It's a long, long way 
to Tipperary." It was not to be a long way to 
those brave men, for half of them were gone 
within eight weeks. They were not too well- 
equipped with guns, nor had they many machine 
guns, but every man In the army was a very 
carefully trained rifle-shot. Against them came 
enemy armies numbering nearly half a milUon 
of men. 

They came Into touch on August 23rd, near 
Mons, against odds of five or six to one. 
They were driven back, of course. That little 
line was turned and almost enveloped. There 
has been little fighting in this war to equal that 
first fighting. But one man cannot fight six 
men : so our army fell back, fighting desperately, 
in hot weather, for nine days. 

Often in that blazing weather, divisions were 
so footsore that they could go no farther. 



14 The War and the Future 

Then they would take position and lie down and 
fight. The only rest they had was when they 
could lie down to fight. And at night, when 
they got to their bleeding feet again and 
plodded on in the dark, a sort of refrain passed 
from rank to rank, " We're the bloody rear- 
guard, and bloody rearguards don't eat and 
bloody rearguards don't sleep, but we're up, 
we're up, we're up the blooming spout." 

They fell back for nine days and nights, till 
the enemy was at the gates of Paris, and the 
Allied cause seemed lost. You know how the 
enemy swept Into Belgium and into Northern 
France, with his myriads of picked men, his 
aeroplanes and overwhelming numbers of guns. 
They marched singing and they came on like a 
tide, supping up cities, Liege, Namur, Mons, 
Cambrai, as though they were the sea itself. 
They beat back everything. The French were 
not ready, the Belgians were only a handful, we 
were only a handful. And then, when they 
were at the gates of Paris, the miracle hap- 
pened. That great army outran Its supplies. 
It advanced so swiftly that the heavy loads of 
shells could not keep pace with It. Then In 
September, 19 14, that great calm soldier Mar- 
shal Joffre wrote those words which will be 



The War and the Future 15 

remembered as long as this war is remembered : 
*' The time has come for going back no further, 
but to die where you stand if you cannot ad- 
vance." Then came the battle of the Marne, 
and people knew that whatever happened there 
would be no overwhelming victory for the 
enemy. He was beaten and had to fall back 
to gather strength for another effort, and all 
his dreams of sudden conquest collapsed. 

But though our armies won at the Marne, it 
was only by miracle; and the essence of miracles 
is that they are not repeated. Our side was 
not ready for war. We were weaker than the 
enemy in guns, men and equipment. Our task 
was still to hold the line somehow, with- 
out guns, and almost without men, but 
by bluff and barbed wire, while guns could 
be forged and men trained. The enemy 
was ready for a second spring long before we 
were ready to resist him, and this second spring 
was not to fail, as the Marne had failed, 
through want of munitions. 

This second spring took place at the end of 
October, 19 14, when we had lost about half our 
original army and had altogether about 100,000 
men in the line, many of them drafts who had 
not had one month's training. This 100,000 



1 6 The War and the Future 

were outgunned and outnumbered. All are 
agreed that the enemy brought against that 
100,000 not less than six times its strength, and 
the battle that followed (the first battle of 
Ypres) lasted for twenty-seven days and nights 
of continuous and bloody fighting. To this day 
no soldier can understand why the enemy 
didn't break through. Our line was so thinly 
held that in many places there were no supports 
and no reliefs of any kind, and the men stayed 
in the trenches till they were killed or wounded. 
That little and weary army underwent a test 
such as no other army has had to stand. The 
enemy shelled our line, with a great concentra- 
tion of guns, and attacked with a great concen- 
tration of men, and broke the line at Gheluvelt, 
near Ypres. It has been thought by some that 
the enemy had only to advance to crumple the 
whole army; and destroy the Allied Cause. 
And then two men (according to the story) 
saved the issue. Two English soldiers, named 
Pugh and Black, gathered up small parties of 
men, regimental cooks and servants, stretcher 
bearers, and walking wounded, and held the 
enemy in check, till what was left of the Worces- 
ter Battalion, about four hundred men, could 
be put in to retake the village. Those four 



The War and the Future 17 

hundred men saved the Hne and prevented a 
defeat. Our generals were writing an order 
for retreat when a staff officer came galloping 
up to them, in wild excitement, and without a 
hat, to shout out that the Worcesters had re- 
stored the line. 

In that most bloody battle of " First Ypres,'' 
one English battalion was obliterated, another 
was remade two and a half times between Oc- 
tober and Christmas, a third, which went in 
987 strong, came out 70 strong; in a fourth, an 
officer who returned to duty after two months 
in hospital, found only one man left who had 
been In the battalion two months before; all the 
rest had gone. 

After that battle, the mud set in, and stopped 
all great movements of men and guns. Both 
sides dug and fortified the lines they were hold- 
ing, and the war became an affair of siege, until 
the spring. 

Then the enemy launched a third attack 
against us, which was by much the most dan- 
gerous attack of the early months of the war. 
He began this attack by an intense bombard- 
ment of the English and French lines near 
Ypres. Then, at nightfall. In the April even- 
ing, while this bombardment was at its height. 



1 8 The War and the Future 

he let loose a great green cloud of chlorine gas, 
which floated across the No Man's Land to our 
lines. Wherever this gas reached the lines it 
choked the men dead, by a death which is un- 
speakably terrible, even for this war. 

The men watched the gas coming. They 
thought that it was a smoke-screen or barrage, 
designed to hide the advance of enemy infantry. 
Suddenly they found the green cloud upon them, 
and their comrades choking and retching their 
lives away in every kind of agony. For a 
while there was a panic. The men In the front 
lines were either killed or put out of action. 
The communication trenches were filled with 
choking and gasping men, flying from the terror 
and dropping as they fled. Night was falling. 
It was nearly dark, and the whole area was 
under an Intense enemy shell-fire. The line 
was broken on a front of four and a half miles; 
and for the time It seemed as though the whole 
front would go. 

The gas had come just at the point where the 
French and the English armies joined each 
other; at a point, that Is, where all words of 
command had to be given In several languages, 
and where any confusion was certain to be In- 
tensified tenfold; there were many Colonial and 



The War and the Future 19 

native troops there, Turcos, Indians, Senega- 
lese, Moroccans, as well as Canadians, French 
and English. All the troops there were shaken 
by this unexpected and terrible death, against 
which they had no guard. 

Then a few officers, whose names, perhaps, 
we may never know, gathered together the 
stragglers and the panic-stricken, and called to 
them to put handkerchiefs and caps and rags of 
blankets and strips of shirt in iPront of their 
faces, and with these as respirators they 
marched the men back into that cloud of death, 
and though many were killed in the attempt, 
enough survived to hold the line, and so we 
were saved for the third time. 

All nations use gas now, but that was the 
first time it was used. It is a very terrible 
thing. I have seen many men dying of it. It 
rots the lungs and the victims gasp away their 
lives. There is a saying, " If you sell your 
soul to the Devil, be sure you get a good price." 
The use of that gas was a selling of the soul, 
and yet the price gotten in exchange was noth- 
ing. They had our line broken with it and for 
weeks they could have beaten us by it. It was 
weeks before our men had proper respirators 
in any number. I do not know why they didn't 



20 The War and the Future 

beat us then; nobody knows. Some think that 
it was because their General Staff did not trust 
their chemists. 

Just at the time when the gas attack was 
preparing outside Ypres, a little army of the 
Allies was landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula, 
" to assist the passage of the fleets through the 
Dardanelles." 

I have been asked about the Gallipoli cam- 
paign. People have complained to me that it 
was a blunder. I don't agree. It had to be 
undertaken; to keep Bulgaria quiet, to keep 
Greece from coming in against us, to protect 
Egypt and to draw the Turkish Army from 
the Caucasus, where Russia was hard pressed. 
People say, " Well, at least it was a blunder to 
attack in the way you did." I say that when 
we did attack, we attacked with the only men 
and the only weapons we had, and in the only 
possible places. 

In war one has to attempt many things, not 
because they are wise or likely to succeed, but 
because they have to be done. In this war, we 
had to attempt them with insufficient means, be- 
cause we were unprepared for war. 

Consider what that attempt meant. 

In the original scheme, the Russians were to 



The War and the Future 21 

co-operate with us, by landing 40,000 nrien on 
the shores of the Bosphorus, so as to divert 
from us a large force of enemy soldiers. We 
brought our men 3,000 miles across the sea, 
and we said to them. In effect, " There are the 
Turks, entrenched, with machine guns and guns 
and shells. You have only rifles. We have no 
guns nor shells to give you. Now land on 
those mined beaches, and take those trenches. 
The Russians will help to some extent; it will 
not be so hard." So the men went ashore and 
took those trenches. Nine days after they were 
ashore, we learned that the Russians could not 
land any men on the Bosphorus, and that we 
were alone In the venture. And then we said 
to our survivors, " The Russians can't come to 
help you, after all. We have no guns nor 
shells to give you. We are so hard pressed In 
France that we can't send you any reinforce- 
ments. The enemy Is entrenched with plenty 
of guns, and lots of shells, but you've got rifles, 
so go and take those trenches, too." So the 
men went and took them. Then we said. In 
effect, " Men and guns are needed In France, 
we can't send you any more just yet." So 
everything was delayed, till the men and guns 
were ready, and then, when they were ready, the 



22 The War and the Future 

enemy was ready, too, and dysentery was rag- 
ing and it was very hot, and there was little to 
drink, and it is a God forgotten land to fight in, 
so we did not win the Peninsula, nor anything 
else, except honor from thinking men. 

I know that every man who was in Gallipoli, 
is and will be prouder of having been there, 
than of anything in his life, past, present, or to 
come. Our men kept a flag flying there to 
which the beaten men of all time will turn in 
trial. 

As you know, in 19 15, the war settled down 
into a struggle between opposing lines of 
trenches, with daily shelling and sniping and oc- 
casional raiding, mining and bombing. The 
next great attack was the attack on Verdun, 
when the enemy launched an army of specially 
fed, trained and rested soldiers, under a hail 
of shells, to break through the French lines. 
That attack lasted with little intermission for 
four months, and it did not break the line. It 
very nearly broke it, but not quite. Perhaps 
nothing can break the line of a free people 
sworn to hold the gates for freedom. Often 
in that fight, little bodies of French and German 
soldiers were shut off for days together by shell- 
fire, men died from hunger and thirst in the 



The War and the Future 23 

wreck of the forts, and those parties of French 
and Germans would count heads to see which 
side had won. 

And while the attack was at its height, and 
while Verdun was still in danger, the English 
and French together counter-attacked in force 
on a line of 25 miles, further to the north, in 
the Department of the Somme, and beat the 
enemy out of his main position there. That 
put an end to the attack on Verdun. The bat- 
tle of the Somme gave another use for the 
enemy's men and guns. The city was saved. 
And a great deal more than the city; for the 
battle of the Somme beat the enemy out of a 
strip of France G^ miles long by from 12 to 20 
deep, where today the great battle of this war 
is being fought. 

This Battle of the Somme was an attack upon 
some of the most elaborate field fortifications 
ever made. On the right of the attack, where 
the French attacked, much of the ground is flat, 
and without good defensive position, but on 
the left, where the English attacked, the 
ground is a succession of rolling chalk down- 
land, rising some hundreds of feet above little 
valleys. On this rolling downland, the enemy 
had dug himself in, when he was strong and 



24 The War and the Future 

we were weak. He had made himself so 
strong there, that he openly boasted that his 
position was impregnable. He had all the 
good positions there. His line was so placed, 
that it was almost always a little above us, and 
he worked to improve these positions night and 
day for nearly two years. 

Perhaps not many here have seen a first rate 
enemy field fortification. I'll try to explain 
what the Somme position was like. 

As you know, the main defence in a modern 
line is the front line system of trenches. 

In front of his front line, the enemy had a 
very elaborate strong tangle of wire, about 4 
feet high and 40 yards across, each wire as 
thick as a double rope yarn and with 16 barbs 
to the foot. 

Hidden in this wire, under the ground, in 
converted shell holes, or in very cunningly con- 
trived little pits, were stations for machine gun- 
ners. Some of these stations were connected 
with the enemy trenches by tunnels, so that the 
gunners could crawl to them under cover. 

In some places, the ground of the wire en- 
tanglement was strewn with trip wire, so near 
the ground as to be invisible, yet high enough 
to catch the feet. In the trip wire were spikes 



The War and the Future 25 

to transfix the men who caught in the trip wire 

and fell. 

Behind the wire tangle were the enemy first 

line trenches. 

These were immense works, designed as per- 
manent field fortresses. They were always 
well made and well sited. In many important 
points of the line they were twelve feet deep, 
and strongly revetted with plank and wicker. 
At intervals of about 50 yards, in some parts of 
the line, were little concrete forts for observers 
and machine guns. These forts were so well 
concealed that they could not be seen from 
without. The slit for the observer or for the 
machine gun to fire through is very tiny, and 
well hidden in the mud of the trench para- 
pet. 

These forts were immensely strong, and very 
small. A man inside one could only be de- 
stroyed by the direct hit of a big shell or by the 
lucky chance of a bullet coming through the nar- 
row slit. You must remember that one cool 
soldier with a machine gun has in his hands the 
concentrated destructive power of 40 or 50 rifle 

men. 

In the wall of the trench parapets on this 
front line, at intervals of 30 to 40 yards, were 



26 The War and the Future 

shafts of stairs leading down 20 or 30 feet into 
the earth. At the bottom of the shafts were 
great underground living rooms, each big 
enough to hold 50 or 100 men. In some places 
shafts led down another 20 feet below these 
living rooms to a second level or storey of dug- 
outs. 

These places were fairly safe in normal 
times, though apt to be foul and ill smelling. 
In bombardments the men kept below in the 
dugouts, out of danger from the shells, till the 
instant of the attack, when they could race up 
the stairs in time to man the fire step, and to 
get their machine guns into action. During the 
intense bombardments, the shafts and stairs 
were blown in, and a good many of the enemy 
were buried alive in these dugouts. Our men, 
when they had captured these trenches, usually 
preferred to sleep in the trenches, not in the 
dugouts, as they said that they would rather 
be killed outright than buried alive. 

In some parts of the battlefield of the 
Somme, the ground is channelled with deep, 
steep-sided, narrow gullies in the chalk, some- 
times 40 feet deep and only 40 feet across, 
like great natural trenches. Three of these 
gullies were made into enemy arsenals and bar- 



The War and the Future 27 

racks of immense strength and capacity. These 
were, the tunnel at St. Pierre Divion, dug mto 
the chalk, so that some thousands of men could 
live under ground within one-quarter mile of the 
front line, in perfect safety; the barracks at the 
Y Ravine, about a mile further north, and the 
barracks in Quarry Gulley, near the Y Ravine. 
In all these immense underground works, the 
enemy had elaborate homes, lit with electricity, 
hung with cretonne and panelled with wood. 
Little stairs led from these dwellings to neat 
machine gun posts overlooking the front line. 
In one of these elaborate underground dwell- 
ings there were cots for children and children's 
toys, and some lady's clothes. It was thought 
that the artillery general who lived there had 
had his family there for the week end. 

Behind all these works, were support and re- 
serve trenches of equal strength, often fully 
wired in, but with fewer dugouts. Then about 
a mile or two miles behind the front Ime, on a 
great crest or table of high chalk downland, 
was the second line, stronger than the front 
line on even more difficult ground, where you 
cannot walk a yard without treading on dust 
of English blood. 

Words cannot describe the strength ot that 



28 The War and the Future 

old fortified line. It was done with the greatest 
technical skill. If you went along it, you 
would notice here and there some little Irregu- 
larity or strangeness, and then you would look 
about, till you could see what devilish purpose 
that little strangeness served. And there was 
always one. The little irregularity gave some 
little advantage, which might make all the dif- 
ference in a battle. The little thing in war al- 
ters the destinies of nations. A grain of sand 
in the body of Napoleon altered the campaign 
of 1 8 12. I know of one great and tragical bat- 
tle In this war which was lost mainly through 
a sprained ankle. 

Our old lines faced these great fortresses at 
a distance of about 200 yards. Our lines are 
nothing like the enemy lines. There were no 
deep dugouts. The wire was comparatively 
slight. The trenches were Inferior. It looked 
as though the work of amateurs was pitted 
against the work of professionals. Yet the 
amateurs held the professionals. 

When Lord Kitchener went to Galllpoll, he 
visited Anzac. At that time, life In Galllpoll 
was becoming anxious, because some 17-Inch 
Skoda gims had been brought down by the 
Turks and were shelling the position. Our 



The War and the Future 29 

men had dug some dugouts 10 or 15 feet deep 
to protect them from these shells. They 
showed them to Kitchener with pride. Kitch- 
ener said, " Of course, they may do for Galli- 
poli, but they aren't nearly deep enough for 
France. We never go down less than 30 feet 
in France." 

So, when the Peninsula men came to France, 
they came with the modest feeling that they 
knew nothing about modern war, nor about 
digging dugouts, and they went into the trenches 
expecting to see dugouts like Egyptian cata- 
combs. They found that the only dugouts were 
pieces of corrugated iron with a few sand bags 
on the top and some shovelsful of mud over all. 

In places where the two lines approached 
each other at a crest, there had been a two years' 
struggle for the possession of the crest; for 
modern war is mainly a struggle for the post 
from which one can see. In all these places 
the space between the lines was a vast and 
ghastly succession of mine pits, fifty or a hun- 
dred feet deep, marked with the wrecks of old 
dugouts, and heads and hands and bodies, and 
sometimes half full of evil water. 

Within the 16 mile limit of the English sec- 
tor of the Somme field, there were in the enemy 



30 The War and the Future 

front line 8 strongholds which the enemy 
boasted were impregnable. 

The Battle of the Somme was the first real 
measuring of strength between the enemy and 
the English. In the early battles, the picked 
men of our race had met their picked men and 
held them. But the picked men were now 
dead, and the armies which fought on the 
Somme were the average mass of the race. 

I must describe the Battle of the Somme. 
On the right, where the ground is flat and there 
is no real defensive position, the French caught 
the enemy by surprise, officers shaving in their 
dugouts, men at breakfast, gun teams going 
down to water. The French made a royal and 
victorious advance at once. 

Our men attacking the strongholds where the 
enemy expected us, lost 50,000 men in the first 
day's fighting and took in that day, the first of 
the 8 impregnable forts. 

I don't think you realize what the Battle of 
the Somme became. It went on for 8 Y^ months 
of intense, bloody and bitter battles for small 
pieces of hill, for the sites of vanished villages, 



The War and the Future 31 

for the stumps of blasted woods and the cellars 
of obliterated farms. 

We got the second of the 8 impregnable 
forts on the fourth day, the third on the seven- 
teenth day, the fourth and fifth on the seventy- 
sixth day, the sixth and strongest on the one 
hundred and twenty-eighth day, and the last two 
at the end. 

I cannot tell you how bitter and bloody the 
fighting in that battle was. The fight for Del- 
ville Wood lasted for nearly two months, and 
in those two months, 400 shells fell every min- 
ute on Delville Wood, and not less than 300,000 
men were killed and wounded there. That 
wood during the battle was a scene of death, 
bloodshed and smash such as cannot be imag- 
ined. You walked in the mud on the bones and 
the flesh of men and on fresh blood dripping 
out of stretchers. By the side of the track was 
a poor starved cat eating the brain of a man. 

In High Wood they fought till the rags and 
bones of dead men hung from the wrecks of the 
trees. In Pozieres, men lived for days and 
nights under a never ceasing barrage designed 
to blow them off the ridge which they had won. 
They were buried and unburied and reburied by 



32 The War and the Future 

shells. There were 20,000 casualties on that 
ghastly table, and the shell-shock cases leaped 
and shook and twittered in every clearing sta- 
tion. 

Twenty-thousand men were killed and 
wounded in the taking of the nest of machine 
guns in the subterranean fort of Mouquet Farm. 
Our men went down into the shafts of that 
fort and fought in the darkness under ground 
there, till the passages were all seamed with 
bullets. 

We lost half a million men in that great bat- 
tle, and we had our reward. For in the winter 
of 19 1 7, in the winter night a great and shat- 
tering barrage raged up along the front. It 
was the barrage which covered the attack on 
Miraumont and drove the enemy from the 
Ancre Valley. The next day came the news 
that Serre had fallen, and we went up and stood 
in Serre. And Gommecourt fell, and the rain 
of shells ceased upon Loupart and La Barque, 
and the news ran along like wildfire, that the 
enemy was going back. 

It was a soaking thaw after frost, and the 
roads, such roads as remained, were over ankle 
deep in mud, and our muddy army got up from 
the mud and went forward through it. 



The War and the Future 33 

All the roads leading to the front were 
thronged by our army, battalion on battalion, 
division on division, guns and transport columns, 
camp kitchens, and artillery transport, going up 
in the mud after the enemy. 

You could see them bringing the railway for- 
ward under fire, under heavy fire, along the 
Ancre Valley. They made the railway and 
the road side by side, with shells falling on 
them and the stink of gas blowing over 
them. And not a man died there, but died In 
exultation, knowing that over his death the 
army was passing to victory. 

Today, as you know, the greatest battle of 
this war Is being fought on that ground. And 
so far, as you know, our men have been hard 
pressed and driven back. 

It is not easy to stand here, while there, over 
the sea, those men are standing in the mud, 
waiting for death to come to them. 

It is no light thing to face death in a modern 
battle, to have been living in the mud, on scanty 
food, with no rest, In all the terror and filth, 
among the blood, the rags of flesh, the half 
buried bodies half eaten with rats, the crashing 
and screaming of shells, all the confusion of a 
stunt, and the cries for stretcher bearers. Only 



34 The War and the Future 

two things are any help in the battlefield, cour- 
age and the comrade beside you. 

And I know that there is no man in the 
French and English armies today, standing-to 
in the mud, waiting for death, who does not 
stand the steadier from the knowledge that this 
country stands behind him, and that the men 
of this country are in the line at his side. 

We here are not helping In the fight; but we 
can help in the fight. We can build up behind 
those men a great wall of love and admiration 
and courage, so that they can feel it, and rest 
their backs against it when they are hard 
pressed. 

It is as well to face the facts of the battle. 
We have lost a tract of France, and our old 
graveyards of the Somme, our huts and water- 
pipes, some guns and dumps of stores and a 
great many men. 

Fortune Is like that in war. When Cortes 
had burnt his ships, and was marching Into 
Mexico, his men growled that they had a hard 
time, with little food and no rest and bloody 
fighting. And Cortes told them that they 
didn^t come there to eat cakes of Utrera, but 
to take their luck as It came and their medicine 



The War and the Future 35 

as it tasted. We came into this war on those 
terms; so did you. 

I've no news to tell you and no comfort to 
give you. The enemy had more aeroplanes 
than we had, and hid his preparations from 
us. He made a big concentration of men and 
guns, and when the weather favoured him he 
put them in, with skill and courage, against that 
part of the line where there are no good natural 
defensive positions. He took the 5th army by 
surprise and drove it back. As it fell back, 
it uncovered the right of the 3rd army, which 
held the good defensive positions. The 3rd 
army had to bend back in conformity, till the 
two armies together reached some sort of a 
line which could be held. Then the enemy 
switched his divisions north, and put in his at- 
tack on Ypres. 

He was able to do this, because his lateral 
communications, behind his lines, are better 
than ours. People may ask, in some surprise, 
"Why are they better?" They are better 
because the enemy has at his disposal a great 
body of slave labour which we have not. He 
has the enslaved populations of Belgium, North 
France and Poland to work for him. 



26 The War and the Future 

Then, In all this fighting, our armies have 
been outnumbered by the enemy. We have 
had concentrated against us not less than two 
millions of the enemy. People have asked, In 
some surprise, " How comes It, that you have 
been outnumbered?" 

We have been outnumbered, presumably be- 
cause the Allied High Command has judged, 
that this Is not the time for the fighting of the 
decisive battle of this war, and that the line 
must be held with comparatively few troops so 
that the reserves for the decisive battle may be 
as large as possible. 

We must be patient, and wait for the counter, 
trusting the goodness of our cause. 

But In thinking of British man-power you 
must remember that though all the belligerent 
countries have to reckon with three big armies, 
we have to reckon with seven. All belligerent 
countries have to reckon with their army of the 
living, their army of the wounded, and their 
army of the dead. We have to reckon all 
these, and our armies of the dead and wounded 
would alone mount up to nearly 2j^ millions 
of men. But we have also to maintain four 
armies which the other belligerent countries 
do not have to have. 



The War and the Future 37 

First, an army of defence, against invasion. 
This is a small army consisting mainly of 
elderly men and of lads in training. We have 
to maintain it; it may be necessary; and " it is 
better to be sure than sorry." 

Then we have armies abroad in distant parts 
of this war, the army in Italy, the army in Sa- 
lonika, and the big garrisons in India and Egypt 
which feed the armies in Mesopotamia and in 
Palestine. All of these armies and garrisons 
melt away continually in the fire of war, and 
everywhere on the roads to those armies, are 
the reinforcements and the drafts swallowing 
up more and yet more men. 

In Gibraltar, and Malta and Alexandria and 
Port Said, you will see, every day, some ship 
filled with our men going out to death in those 
far fields, and you will see the men standing on 
the deck and cheering, as the ship draws away 
and leaves home and sweetness and pleasant 
life behind, for ever. 

Then, besides these, we have the army of 
the sick. The great epidemical scourges of 
ancient armies have been nearly eliminated 
from this war; but we have been forced to 
maintain armies in distant outposts of this war, 
in Gallipoli, in Salonika, and in Mesopotamia 



38 The War and the Future 

where the men have suffered much from trop- 
ical diseases, dysentery and malarial fever. 
We have some hundreds of thousands of men 
who have been weakened by these complaints; 
not wrecked by them, but so weakened that 
they cannot stand the life in the trenches. 

And besides all those armies, we have a vast 
army of the very flower of our race, both men 
and women. It may consist of four or five 
millions of men and women who work in treble 
shifts, day and night, as they have worked for 
the last three years, making the things of war, 
not only for ourselves but for our Allies. Our 
Allies are not manufacturing people. Russia 
made few things, France's coal and steel are in 
the hands of the enemy, Italy makes few things. 
We have had to supply these people not only 
with equipment of all kinds, guns, clothing and 
shells, but with ships and coal. Not less than 
half a million men have done nothing in England 
since the war began but get and ship coal for 
the Allies. They have sent not less than 60 
million tons of coal to the Allies since the war 
began. 

Then a part of that army builds ships, and 
ever more ships, and yet never enough ships for 



The War and the Future 39 

the needs of this great war and for the sup- 
ply of our friends. 

The enemy spreads abroad lies concerning 
us. I am not going to answer them. Lies do 
not last long. 

There is no need to lie about a people. Still 
less is there any need to lay claim to this or 
that glory. No nation is so bad that it has 
not something very good in it; and none so 
glorious that it has not some taint of self. 

And I'm not here to sing my country's 
praises. No one will do that. Patriotism, as 
I see it, is not a fine drawing of the sword, be- 
hind some winged and glittering Victory. It is 
nothing at all of all that. It is a very sad thing 
and a very deep thing and a very stern thing. 

St. George did not go out against the dragon 
like that divine calm youth in Carpaccio's pic- 
ture, nor like that divine calm man in Dona- 
tello's statue. He went out, I think, after 
some taste of defeat, knowing that it was going 
to be bad, and that the dragon would breathe 
fire and that very likely his spear would break 
and that he wouldn't see his children again and 
people would call him a fool. He went out, 
I think, as the battalions of our men went out, 



40 The War and the Future 

a little trembling and a little sick and not know- 
ing much about it, except that it had to be 
done, and then stood up to the dragon in the 
mud of that far land, and waited for him to 
come on. 

I know what England was, before the war. 
She was a nation which had outgrown her ma- 
chine, a nation which had forgotten her soul, a 
nation which had destroyed Jerusalem among 
her dark Satanic mills. 

And then, at a day's notice, at the blowing of 
a horn, at the cry from a little people in dis- 
tress, all that was changed, and she re-made 
her machine, and she remembered her soul, 
which was the soul of St. George who fought 
the dragon, and she cried, " I will rebuild 
Jerusalem in this green and pleasant land or 
die in the attempt." 

Don't think that this was due to this or that 
man, to Kitchener, or to another, or to another. 
It was due to something kindling and alive in 
the nation's soul. 

When I first went to the Somme, it was on 
the day we took Martinpuich and Flers. And 
on my way up, I passed a battalion going in. 
They were being played up by the band, to the 
tune of " It's a long, long trail awinding to the 



The War and the Future 41 

land of my dreams." It wasn't a long trail, 
nor a winding trail to most of those men, but 
only a few miles of a quite straight road to 
le Sars, where I found their graves afterwards. 

That tune is perhaps the favourite tune of the 
army today. The army knows that it is a long, 
long trail, and a winding one, to the land of 
our dreams. 

And if in this war it has seemed, that we 
have done little. If it has seemed, that we re- 
treated at Mons, and only just held at Ypres, 
and withdrew from Gallipoll, and stood still at 
Salonika, and were driven back at St. Quentin 
and are hard pressed on the Ridge, I think 
you somehow feel, that with It all, no matter 
how long the trail is, nor how winding, nor 
how bitter nor how bloody, we'll stick It, as 
long as we've a light to go by, even If we're not 
so clever as some, nor so attractive. 

And what Is the land of our dreams? We 
must think of that. 

In the Bible there Is the story of King David, 
who was a very generous and very bloody yet 
very noble man. And David, besieging a city 
In the summer, was faint from thirst, and he 
said, " I wish I had some of the water from 
that pool by the city gate." And three men 



42 The War and the Future 

heard him and they took bottles and broke 
through the enemy pickets and filled their 
bottles and brought the water to David. But 
David would not drink water brought to him 
at such risk. He said, it would be like drink- 
ing blood; so he poured it out to his God. 

The men of those armies in the mud are 
bringing us water at the risk of their lives, the 
living water of peace, that peace which I think 
will be the peace that passes all understanding, 
peace to have our lives again and do our work 
again and be with our loves again. But if we 
go back to the world of before the war, that 
peace won't serve us, it will be a drinking of the 
blood of all those millions of young men. 

I said some time ago, that the only things 
which matter in war are courage and the love 
of your comrades. When this war ends, we 
shall need all our courage and all our com- 
rades, in that re-making of the world, which 
will follow this destruction. And I hope that 
when that time comes, you will not think of us 
again, as cold, or contemptuous, or oppressive, 
but as a race of men who went down to the 
death for a friend in trouble, as St. George did, 
on this day, so many centuries ago. 

And in the light of that adventure I hope 



The War and the Future 43 

that we may stand together to remake this 
broken world, a little nearer to the heart's de- 
sire. 



THE WAR AND THE FUTURE 

A Lecture Given in America 
January-May, igi8 

I HAVE been sent to you, to speak about the war, 
and about the future, after the war. 

You know more than I do about the future. 
No one can doubt that this country holds the fu- 
ture. I will try to tell you about the war. I've 
seen it close to, and I've seen its results. 

English people who know America, and who 
have a pride in the fair fame of England, know, 
that in the old days, we did this country a great 
wrong. I, here, am very conscious of that. 
The best thing I can say of that past is that it 
is the past. We are now associates in a great 
work which is a forgetting and a putting by of 
the past, in an effort to make the future. 

Whatever this war is, it is a getting rid of 
the past. The past has gone into the bonfire. 
We are all in the war now, realizing with more 
or less surprise and shock and bitterness, that 
the old delights, the old ideals, the old way of 

44 



The War and the Future 45 

life, with Its comfortable loves and hatreds, are 
gone. We have to remake our lives, forget 
our old hatreds and learn new ones, and ask 
ourselves the question: " What kind of a new 
world am I going to help make? " 

This war came gradually to you. You were, 
as we were, not expecting war, seeing the threat 
and the preparation of war, but believing, just 
as we believed, that commonsense, or ordinary 
human sense, and one-thousandth part of good- 
will in human Intercourse would make war im- 
possible. War to you, as to us, seemed to be 
out of date in a century which cut the Panama 
Canal and discovered Radium and the wireless 
telegraph. But it came none the less, and all 
our ten millions of adults had suddenly to put 
by their old lives and take on new and dan- 
gerous and terrible lives. Now the same thing 
has happened to you. 

When the threat of this war came suddenly 
to Europe we had nothing to gain by war, ex- 
cept our own soul. That is a big exception. 
Short of that, we risked everything to keep 
the peace, as our friends complained, and our en- 
emies agreed. 

When the war came to us, and the enemy 
Ambassador was leaving England, a friend of 



46 The War and the Future 

mine went to say good-bye to him. My friend 
said to him: " I hope you think that we did 
our best to prevent this war ? " The Ambassa- 
dor said: ''You have done everything that 
mortals could to prevent the war." 

Now the years before the war were very 
anxious years to every one. The threat of 
war hung over every nation in Europe, and 
every nation in Europe felt and said and wrote 
that the threat of war was a German threat. 
The Germans themselves were frank about It. 
I often used to see German students and Ger- 
man professors in England. They used to say, 
quite openly, " Our next war will be with Eng- 
land." After the Hague Conference nine 
years ago, the English delegate said to me that 
the attitude of Germany could only be ex- 
plained on the supposition that she meant to 
have a war. Germany was like an athlete 
trained to the minute; she was spoiling for a 
scrap. When boxers are trained to the minute, 
It Is said that their friends always prefer to 
walk behind them, for when a boxer who Is 
very fit and spoiling for a scrap sees a nice chin 
the temptation to hit that chin Is sometimes 
more than he can bear. 

In the summer of 19 14, the European chins 



The War and the Future 47 

looked too tempting to Germany, and she hit 
out at them. The results are before us. 

This war employs all the strength and all the 
talent of the nations waging it. One of the 
weapons used by our enemies has been that of 
lying. They have spread abroad lies about us, 
which many repeat and some few, perhaps, be- 
lieve. I wish here to state and answer some 
of those lies. 

Firstly: that we are a decadent people, in- 
tent on sports and money-making, and without 
ideals or any sense of serving the state. 

The answer to that is that in England and 
Scotland alone five million four hundred thou- 
sand of our men enlisted as volunteers to fight 
for our ideals, without compulsion of any kind, 
while three million more who tried to enlist 
were rejected as too old, or physically unfit, or 
needed in other work. That was before we 
had conscription. 

Secondly: that we are a cowardly people, who 
let other people fight for us. 

The answer to that is that had we been a 
cowardly people we should not have gone to 
war; but we did; we came into this war and 
have lost in this war something like two and 
one-half millions of our best men killed. 



4^ The War and the Future 

wounded and missing, and this without count- 
ing the losses of the men of our Colonies. 

Thirdly: That we are a mean people, who 
do not take our fair share in the war. 

The answer to that is, that we hold one-third 
of the line in France, much of the line in Italy, 
nearly all the line in Serbia, all the line in Pal- 
estine and Mesopotamia, and all the line on 
the vast colonial fronts in Africa. We supply 
or have supplied France, Italy, Serbia, Belgium, 
Roumania and Russia with millions of tons of 
equipment of all sorts, guns, shells, uniforms, 
boots and machines, in all amounting to 3,000 
million dollars worth. We feed and clothe 
and always have fed and clothed since the war 
began the greater part of the population of Bel- 
gium and practically the whole of the popula- 
tion of Serbia. Besides our contributions of 
men and guns, we have Immense hospital or- 
ganizations working in Russia, In Italy, In Rou- 
mania, and with the French. We have had the 
greater part of the policing of the seas to do, 
and practically all the submarine hunting. The 
sea Is not an easy place to patrol, and the sub- 
marine is not an easy thing to catch, but not 
much German trade has been done by sea since 
the war, and not many raiders have got through 



The War and the Future 49 

our guards and we have sunk (I believe) not 
less than ten times as many submarines as the 
enemy had at the beginning of the war. We 
have built ships to make our navy at least half 
as strong again as it was before the war. We 
have caused to be made and transported 25,- 
000,000 tons of shells, and we have conveyed to 
and from different parts of the globe, as soldiers 
going and coming, well, sick or wounded, 
some 13,000,000 men. Our policing of the 
sea has been so done that we have lost by en- 
emy action 2,700 of these 13,000,000 travelling 
soldiers. 

Then in money, we have spent on this war 
five billion five hundred million dollars, of which 
rather more than one-fifth has been loaned or 
given to our Allies. 

People sometimes say a fourth lie about us: 
— that we are a grasping people who will profit 
by this war. 

Let me say this, that no one will profit from 
this war. We in Europe will be beggared by 
it for years to come; only we want the world 
to profit by it, by a change of heart, by an un- 
derstanding among the nations, and by the 
knowledge which we In Europe needed this war 
to teach us, that human life is the precious thing 



50 The War and the Future 

on this earth, and that we are here truly linked 
man to man, and not divided up nation by na- 
tion. We are one body of humanity. 

There is a fifth lie, that we are a greedy 
people, who ask you Americans to starve, while 
we feast on white bread and other delicacies. 
The answer to that is, that no white bread has 
been made in England for at least eighteen 
months, and that there is no feasting there. 
There is no home in all that land that is not the 
sadder for this war. 

There is no need to lie about a nation any 
more than there is any need to lie about a man. 
The truth emerges above any lie. 

I know my nation's faults as well as I know 
my own. They are the faults of a set and of 
a system. They are faults of head, they are 
not faults of heart. When I think of those 
faults I think of a long graveyard in France, 
a hundred miles long, where simple, good, kind, 
ignorant Englishmen by the thousand and the 
hundred thousand lie in every attitude of rest 
and agony, for ever and for ever and for ever. 
They did not know where Belgium is, nor what 
Germany is, nor even what England is. They 
were told that a great country had taken a little 
country by the throat, and that it was up to 



The War and the Future 51 

them to help, and they went out by the hundred 
and the hundred thousand, and by the million, 
on that word alone, and they stayed there, in 
the mud, to help that little country, till they 
were killed. 

I've been along many miles of that old line, 
and seen those graves, many of them not even 
marked, except by a bayonet, or a bit of pack- 
ing case, and I've thought, as I went along, 
what epitaph could be put above that unend- 
ing graveyard, and I could only think of one 
epitaph, '' These men came here of their own 
free will to help their fellow men in trouble.'* 

There comes the question, what is the war 
about? Each nation has its answer to that 
question, an answer that could be put into 
twenty words. But in each country, for many 
years before the war, millions of prejudices, 
and beliefs, and customs, and Ignorances, and 
blindnesses, and memories, went to make the 
war. The question, what it is about, does not 
now so deeply matter, as the question, what the 
struggle is, now that it is In full swing. 

It is a struggle between two conceptions of 
life, the soldier's and the civilian's. Both con- 
ceptions have existed ever since the world began. 
Much may be said for both. 



52 The War and the Future 

The soldier says, in theory, " Men are not 
of much account; it is the man who matters. 
The man must have power over other men 
and be able to direct them as he chooses and 
punish them if they disobey; since men need a 
strong hand. A State can only be strong if it 
is so organized as to be obedient within and 
feared without. Every man within the State 
owes service to the State, he must be trained 
to defend it and fight for it. All men of a cer- 
tain wealth and standing must be officers; the 
rest are and must be cannon fodder. The citi- 
zens must have good roads fit for the move- 
ment of troops, adequate food and housing, a 
thorough military training and as much school- 
ing as may be good for soldiers.'' Punctuality, 
hard work, and cleanliness are made much of; 
merit of certain kinds Is certain of Its reward, 
the citizens are ticketed, looked after, used and 
pensioned. They are not encouraged to think 
for themselves nor permitted to break the regu- 
lations. Napoleon In France and T'chaka In 
Zululand both created soldier states In the last 
century. 

The civilian says, In effect, " It Is true, that 
in case of need every man must be ready to 
fight for his State, and should be trained so that 



The War and the Future 53 

he may do so, but war is not a normal condi- 
tion, it is an accident which may not occur, and 
the direction of the State by soldiers is apt to 
create a privileged class, who will enslave the 
remainder of the citizens for their own ends, 
which may be base and probably will be cruel, 
and which may and very likely will bring about 
that state of war which they are created to 
prevent." So that, in the civilian state, the 
army is made small, and interferences with per- 
sonal liberty are bitterly resented and swiftly 
opposed. The occupation of the civilian state 
is generally commerce. Its relaxation or 
amusement is generally the adornment of the 
individual life, with the arts and sciences which 
enrich life and make it pleasant. The general 
feeling is, that men were not meant to be the 
slaves of other men nor of human systems; but 
to develop themselves in as loose, easy and 
pleasant an organization as a nation can be 
without collapsing. 

Those are the two theories and ways of life, 
both have been tried and both will work, and 
both have left great marks in history. 

But in working, both are open to grave de- 
fects. No nation Is perfect, and no system of 
living will suit all the people all the time; and 



54 The War and the Future 

these ways of life, if persisted in by any nation 
for three or four generations, intensify them- 
selves, till, in the military state there is too 
much control and in the civilian state too little. 
In the civilian state, where much is left to the 
individual, much is left undone. Many indi- 
viduals grow up to be highly educated, pleas- 
ant and agreeable men, but more grow up with 
the feeling that there is nothing to stop them 
from exploiting their fellow citizens, and this 
they do quite as ruthlessly as any soldier, and 
with far less recompense. The soldier may 
drive his men, but he feeds, clothes and pen- 
sions them. The civilian may drive his men 
and scrap them as old tools when he has broken 
them. Very soon. In the civilian state, Indi- 
vidualism comes to a point In which the service 
of the State Is left to those who care for that 
kind of thing. Those who do care for that 
kind of thing find that the fear of Interference 
with liberty, which Is the main passion In a 
civilian state, has prevented them from having 
any power. They can do neither good nor evil, 
and so they stagnate. They cease to attract 
the finer and more active kinds of mind. So 
that In a civilian state though you may find cul- 
ture, politeness, niceness of feeling, enlighten- 



The War and the Future 55 

ment, and a wise protection of the individual 
against certain aggressions by King and State, 
and a great commerce, strongly protected, you 
may also find the man of action discounte- 
nanced, and the talker in power in his stead. 

In the military state, the soldier justifies him- 
self to his subjects by some act which rids the 
State of a danger or enriches it with a piece of 
plunder, so that he is able to say, " You see, the 
Army saved you or enriched you. You see 
that you must have an Army." When the 
army is enlarged, he attacks another State and 
enriches his own State still further; definitely 
enriches his officers with gifts of other people's 
property and his surviving men with bits of 
other people's lands, and at the same time in- 
creases his army by conscripting the conquered 
peoples. 

Presently he forgets that the State is any- 
thing except himself. He cries out that the 
State is himself, since he is the head of the 
Army and the Army is the State. He subordi- 
nates everything to the army. He tolerates 
schools only in so far as they teach military 
maxims, and women only because they produce 
cannon fodder. He encourages bad manners 
in his officers, because he thinks that it teaches 



^6 The War and the Future 

them to dominate; he preaches about duty and 
his own magnificence in his churches and 
schools, because he thinks that it teaches people 
to obey. And at last, when his entire State 
does obey, and all his officers have bad manners, 
and a desire to dominate everybody, he has in 
his hands a terrible instrument of destruction 
which may be launched anywhere at his ca- 
price. He is that irresponsible autocratic 
power who has been the main cause of war for 
twenty centuries. 

But for the fact that all the power and blind 
obedience of a nation may be flung anywhere 
at the caprice of one man, there is much to be 
said for the military state. But that fact damns 
it, and the world has never allowed it to con- 
tinue. The gunman who may be drunk or mad 
or savage at any minute is too dangerous to be 
allowed in the house. Rome, who had nobly 
held the Idea of law, became that kind of State 
and fell. France, who had nobly held the Idea 
of liberty, became that kind of State, and fell; 
and the savage Zulus, who made themselves a 
people and then an exterminating scourge also 
fell; and I feel that a grosser people, who have 
upheld neither law nor liberty, but have become 
exterminating scourges, will also fall. We 



The War and the Future 57 

civilian peoples, flouted, insulted, and taken un- 
awares, are banded together to make that con- 
ception of life to fall. 

Last April I was in a dirty little town in 
France. On my right there was a ruined fac- 
tory containing a pile of smashed sewing ma- 
chines, on my left there was a casualty clearing 
station, in what had once been a rather nice 
house. Just outside the hospital there was a 
little old French woman selling newspapers; 
and dozens of soldiers were buying news- 
papers and talking about the news. One of 
the soldiers shouted out, " Hooray, America 
has declared war,'' and another, who was older 
and more thoughtful, said, " Thank God, now 
we may have a decent world again." 

War in one way is very like Mrs. Mac- 
Gregor. 

The poet Swinburne, when he was a young 
man, was very fond of impassioned conversa- 
tion and of whisky. One night he met a friend, 
and suggested that the friend should come to 
his lodgings for a talk. On their way Swin- 
burne bought a bottle of whisky and with an air 
of satanIc cunning hid it in his tail pocket, and 
said, " I must be very careful; my landlady is 
a very troublesome woman." When they 



58 The War and the Future 

reached the door Swinburne said, " We must 
go in very quietly; my landlady is a very trouble- 
some woman." They opened the door and 
crept in on tiptoe, and were just creeping up- 
stairs, when a door opened and a stern voice 
said, "Is that you, Mr. Swinburrrrrne ? " 
" Yes, Mrs. MacGregor," said Swinburne. 
Then the voice said, " Whattan is yon wee 
bottle in yeir bit pocket, Mr. Swinburrrne ? " 
" O," said Swinburne, " it's my cough-mixture, 
Mrs. MacGregor; I'm afraid I've caught cold." 
" Cough-mixture me nae cough-mixture," said 
Mrs. MacGregor; " yon is a bottle of whuskey. 
And ye'll give it heer, Mr. Swinburrrne. 
Didn't I promise yeir father ye shuld na touch 
the whuskey?" And she grabbed the bottle 
and disappeared, and Swinburne was left wring- 
ing his hands and saying, *' She's a very trouble- 
some woman." 

That is a light story, but it reminds me of the 
war. Many and many a gathering of friends 
has been interrupted by that savage goddess. 
All over Europe, quiet, gentle, ordinary men, 
who were going, as they thought, to the enjoy- 
ment of delight, have been seized upon and 
robbed by her, not only of material things, but 
of love and leisure and of life itself. 



The War and the Future 59 

There Is a story of a young king of India, 
who became a leper whom no one could cure. 
An old man told him that If he went to a cer- 
tain city and ate bread In a house where there 
was no sorrow, he would be cured. So he went 
to the city, and went Into every house, but there 
was no house that had no sorrow, so he was 
not cured. " There was no house that had 
not one dead." 

There Is no house, poor or rich, In any of 
the countries now fighting In Europe that has 
not one dead, generally some quite young man. 



Many great minds have brooded over war; 
most of the great minds of the world have 
taken part In war, and some have tried to un- 
derstand It. No great mind has ever looked 
upon It as a good thing, though they see that 
sometimes In life outrageous, devilish evil can 
be checked In no other way. To most of them. 
Homer, Euripides, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, it Is 
nearly the last, greatest and completest evil that 
can come Into human life. 

You all know how a fever comes upon the 
body. Poison must be Introduced Into It from 
outside, some living poison of germs; the body 



6o The War and the Future 

must be predisposed to nurture the poison; it 
must be a little overstrained, restless, tired, 
bored, cross, or out of sorts. The natural 
guards of the body must be unable to help. 
Then the poison germs take hold and the nor- 
mal life of the man ceases. He becomes a rag- 
ing incoherent maniac terrible to himself and a 
danger to all about him, till the poison is at its 
height and has worked itself out in death or 
recovery. 

Well, you will agree with me perhaps that 
war comes into the world, in much such a way. 
The body of a nation does not want it, though 
it may think about it often and much, the body 
of a nation is normally busy with its own life. 
Then, in times of overstrain, of restlessness, or 
of excitement, or even of busy and pleasant 
well-being, the poison is introduced, wilfully, 
by kings and their ministers, and the nation 
sickens. 

The symptoms are always the same. The in- 
fected nation becomes, first of all, arrogant. 
It gets what we call swelled-head. It thinks 
Itself, possibly with reason, the finest nation in 
the world. As the poison takes hold and the 
germs multiply, this arrogance leads to a 
spiritual blindness to whatever may be good or 



The War and the Future 6i 

right in any other nation in the world. This 
blindness leads to an indifference to whatever 
any other nation may do or care. This indif- 
ference leads to the bloody theory, that it is a 
duty to subjugate any other nation. And at 
this point, the poison boils over in the system, 
the nation involved runs up a temperature, and 
it passes rapidly from acts of injustice to some 
culminating act of impiety, such as cannot be 
permitted, and against which a protest has to 
be made by the outraged world. 

Then comes war, which goes on, like a fever, 
till the nation is dead or cured. 

That may not be how all wars begin, but 
that is how the greatest and longest and most 
evil wars have begun, in modern times. A na- 
tion has caught a fever, run up a temperature, 
gone mad and bitten, been a danger and a 
scourge to the world, and has gradually sick- 
ened itself out Into exhaustion, peace and wis- 
dom. Spain had such a fever three hundred 
years ago, when her motto was the proud 
boast, " The world does not suffice for us." 
France had such a fever a century later. Eng- 
land had such a fever when she forced this 
country Into the Rebellion. 

In all three countries, there was just that 



62 The War and the Future 

same Irresponsible autocratic power to cultivate 
the fever for his own ends. And who held that 
power? The Immense power and wealth of 
Spain were controlled by Phillip the Second, one 
old, miserly, stubborn dotard, a sort of a re- 
ligious mule. The immense and ordered power 
of France was controlled by Louis Quatorze, 
one little man who wore high-heeled shoes and 
an Immense wig to give himself some air of 
greatness. Afterwards it was held by Napo- 
leon, of whom the French now say that he was 
as great as any man can be without principles. 
And who held the power of England? The 
elderly, pear-headed, self-willed German, often 
mad and always stupid, who wondered how the 
apple got Inside the dumpling. And working 
with him were the few, corrupt and evil fami- 
lies engaged In the enslavement of the English 
poor. 

Such were the four Irresponsible autocrats 
who caused the greatest, longest and most evil 
wars of the past. But all the fever of their 
wars, multiplied ten-fold, would be as nothing 
to the fever of arrogance, blindness, wild and 
bloody thinking, and Impious dealing, with 
which another Irresponsible autocrat prepared 
the present war. No former autocrat took 



The War and the Future 63 

such pains to organize armed force, and to 
make the evil blood in his nation to run so 
hotly. No former autocrat had such skill or 
such clever servants to prepare and direct the 
outburst. And no former autocrat has reaped 
such a crop of bloodshed, massacre and de- 
struction. 

I'm not here to abuse our present enemies. 
We are against them today, but we have been 
with them in the past and we shall have to be 
with them in the future, if there is to be any 
future. In this life, collections of men behave 
worse than individuals, and it is the thought, 
and the way of life and the irresponsible auto- 
crat that make them behave worse, that are the 
evil things. This war might have been averted, 
but that that one irresponsible autocrat was 
afraid of democracy. Consider what he has 
let loose upon the world. Consider, too, what 
he has raised against him. 

A few minutes ago, I said that the greatest 
minds among men looked upon war as nearly 
(but not quite) the last, greatest and completest 
evil that can come into human life. Nearly, 
but not quite. There is one completer evil, 
that of letting proud, bloody and devilish men 
to rule this world. While proud, bloody and 



64 The War and the Future 

devilish men strike for power here, free men, 
who had rather die than serve them, will strike 
against them. And evil as war is, that resolve 
of the free soul is beautiful. It is in that re- 
solve that we free peoples are banded, and it is 
in that resolve that we shall fight, till the proud, 
bloody and devilish idea is gone. 

All of you here have read about this war 
daily for more than three years. All of you 
know some one who is taking part in it, and all 
of you have in your minds some picture of what 
it is like. The population of these States is 
said to be nearly a hundred millions. Not less 
than twenty-five millions of men, or the equiva- 
lent of the entire adult male population of these 
States are or have been engaged in the fighting 
of this war, and not less than another forty 
millions are engaged in the making the fighting 
possible, by the making of arms, equipment and 
munitions. Then besides those millions there 
are ten million dead, and twenty million 
maimed, disabled, blinded or lunatic soldiers 
who will never fight again. 

You begin to meet the war many miles from 
any part of the fighting. You come upon a vil- 
lage of little huts near a railway siding. A 
month later you find that the village has become 



The War and the Future 65 

a town. A month later you find that the town 
has become a city. In that city the picked in- 
tellect of your country uses the picked knowl- 
edge of the universe to make the picked devilry 
of this war, some gas that will be deadlier than 
the other man's, some shell that will kill over a 
bigger area, some bomb that will go off with a 
louder bang and blast a bigger hole in a town. 

You go elsewhere, and you see miles of chim- 
neys spouting fire, where every known force is 
pressing every known metal into every known 
kind of engine of death. 

You see the nimblest brains and hands and 
all the finest courage perfecting our control of 
the air. You see men gathering and packing 
food, breaking stones for roads and shaping 
sleepers for railways. You see men by the 
million about whom nobody cared, in the old 
days, in peace, suddenly taken up, and fed and 
clad and taught, and made much of. You see 
horses and cars by the hundred thousand, and 
everything that is swift and strong and clever 
and destructive, suddenly important and de- 
sired and of great account. You see the toil 
of a nation suddenly intensified sevenfold, and 
made acute, and better paid than it ever was, 
and intellect, the searching intellect, that light 



66 The War and the Future 

of the mind which brings us out of the mud, 
suddenly sought for in the street. And you 
think, " Is man awaking suddenly to his heri- 
tage, and to the knowledge of what life may be 
here? " Then you say to yourself, *' No, this 
is all due to the war." 

You see young men giving up their hopes, 
and mature men their attainments, and women 
losing their sons, their husbands and their 
chance of husbands, and children losing their 
fathers and their chances of life, and you ask, 
what earthly endeavour can cause all this sac- 
rifice, into what kind of a hopper is it all being 
fed? It is being fed into the war. 

The war is spread over a tract as big as these 
States. In many places the tide of war has 
passed and repassed several times, till the 
dwellers in those places have died of starvation, 
or been carried away Into slavery. In the East, 
you can walk for miles along roads peopled with 
mad, starving and dying men and women; there 
are heaps of little bones all along the roads. 
They are all little bones. They are the little 
bones of little children who have died of starva- 
tion there. All the bigger bones have been 
taken by the enemy to make artificial manure. 



The War and the Future 67 

In the West, there Is a strip of land about 
four hundred and fifty miles long, by from ten 
to twenty broad. It is called the Army Zone. 
With the exception of a few poor people who 
sell little things, such as fruit and tobacco, to 
the soldiers, all the Inhabitants of that zone are 
gone. The place Is Inhabited by the armies. 
The business there is destruction, and rest, after 
destruction, so that the destroyers may destroy 
again. 

All that strip of France and Flanders was 
once happily at peace. All of it was rich and 
prosperous, with corn and wine and Industry. 
Even the mountains were covered with timber. 
Today, after the manhood of four nations has 
fought over It for three and a half years it is 
a sight which no man can describe. 

If one could look down upon that strip from 
above, it would look like a broad ribbon laid 
across France. The normal colour of a coun- 
tryside Is green, and green country would ap- 
pear on both sides of the strip. At the edges 
however the green would lose Its brightness. It 
would look dull and rather mottled; further 
from the edges It would look still duller, and In 
the centre of the strip no trace of green would 



68 The War and the Future 

show, it would all be dark except that the dark- 
ness would glitter in many places with little 
flashes of fire. 

And if one comes to that strip by any of the 
roads which lead to it, one sees, at first, simply 
the normal French landscape, which is tidy, 
well-cultivated land, on a big scale, with little 
neat woods and little, compact villages. 
One notices that many houses are closed, and 
that very few men are about. Presently one 
comes to a village, where one or two of the 
houses are roofless, and perhaps the church 
tower has a hole in it. And if you ask, you 
hear, " No, the enemy never got so far as here, 
but they shelled it." A little further on, you 
come to a village where every other house is 
a burnt-out shell, all down the street. And if 
you ask how this came about, that every other 
house should be destroyed, you hear, *' O, the 
enemy occupied this place and burnt every other 
house for punishment." And if you ask, pun- 
ishment for what? You hear, " O, some of 
the enemy got drunk here and fired at each 
other, and they said we did it, so they shot the 
Maire and burnt every other house." 

Then, a little further on, you come to a vil- 
lage where there are no roofs nor any big part 



The War and the Future 69 

of a house, but heaps of brick and stone much 
blackened with fire, and on both sides of the 
road you see gashes and heapings of the earth 
and a great many stakes supporting barbed 
wire, and a general mess and litter as though 
there had been a fair there in rather rainy 
weather. And if you ask about this, they say, 
" Ah, this is where our old support line ran, 
just along here, and just under the church in 
what used to be the charnel-house, we had the 
snuggest little dug-out that ever was." 

Then if you go on, you come to a landscape 
where there is no visible living thing; nothing 
but a blasted bedevilled sea of mud, gouged 
into great holes and gashed into great trenches, 
and blown into immense pits, and all littered and 
heaped with broken iron, and broken leather, 
and rags and boots and jars and tins, and old 
barbed wire by the ton and unexploded shells 
and bombs by the hundred ton, and where there 
is no building and no road, and no tree and no 
grass, nothing but desolation and mud and 
death. 

And if you ask, '' Is this Hell? " They say, 
" No, this is the market place where we are 
standing. The church is that lump to the 
right." Then if you look down you see that 



70 The War and the Future 

the ground, though full of holes, Is littered 
with little bits of brick, and you realize that 
you are standing in a town. 

If you go on a little further, you notice that 
the mud is a little fresher. You come to a 
deafening noise, which bursts in a succession of 
shattering crashes, followed by long wailing 
shrieks, partly like gigantic cats making love, 
and partly as though the sky were linen being 
ripped across. The noise makes you sick and 
dizzy. 

If you go on a little further you come to a 
place where the ground is being whirled aloft 
in clods and shards, amid clouds of dust and 
smoke and powdered brick. Screaming shells 
pass over you or crash beside you, and you 
realize then that you are at the front. Like 
Voltaire, you say, " I am among men, because 
they are fighting. I am among civilized men 
because they are doing It so savagely." And 
when the smoke and dust of the shells clear 
away, you see no men, civilized or savage, noth- 
ing but a vast expanse of mud, with a dead 
mule or two, and great black and white devils 
of smoke where shells are bursting. 

In parts of that strip of France, especially 
In the broadest part, you come upon places 



The War and the Future 71 

where the ground is almost unmarked with 
shell-fire. There are no traces of fighting, no 
graves, no litter of broken men or broken equip- 
ment, the fields are green and there is no noise 
of war. Yet all the houses are ruined; they 
have been gutted, their roofs have been blown 
off or their fronts pulled out, and in their 
streets you will sometimes see vast collections 
of pots, pans, desks, tables, chairs, pictures, all 
smashed, evidently wantonly smashed; men 
have evidently defaced them, cut, burnt, and 
banged them. And you notice that for miles 
of that country all the best of the trees, espe- 
cially the fruit trees, have been cut down, not 
for firewood, for they are all there, with their 
heads in the mud, but for wanton devilry. 

And if you ask about this, you will hear — 
" O, no; there was no fighting here, but this is 
the ground the enemy couldn't hold. When 
he lost the ground to the north, he had to re- 
treat from here in a hurry, but he showed his 
spite first. First he took away the few re- 
maining boys and girls to work for him at mak- 
ing shells or digging trenches. Then they went 
from house to house and collected all the furni- 
ture and property into the central place of the 
town; then all that was good or valuable or 



72 The War and the Future 

not too bulky was taken by enemy soldiers, offi- 
cers as well as men, as prize of war, and sent 
home to their homes. But all the rest, the 
things too bulky to pack, were deliberately 
smashed, defiled and broken, and the fruit trees 
were systematically killed." 

I was in one such town in France last March 
the day after the enemy left it, and I went into 
one poor man's garden no bigger than this plat- 
form. Five or six little flowering plants had 
been pulled up by the roots. One little plum- 
tree and two currant bushes had been cut 
through, and the wall parting this garden from 
its neighbour had been thrown down. All the 
wells in this district were poisoned by the en- 
emy before he left. He referred to this in his 
Orders as being " according to modern theories 
of war." 

Over all that area of the Army Zone, the 
business of the inhabitants Is destruction; they 
rest not day nor night, not even fog nor snow 
will stop them. I have watched a raging battle 
in a snowstorm, and one of our neatest suc- 
cesses was made In a fog. And at night the 
darkness Is lit with starshells, beautiful coloured 
rockets, flares, searchlights and magnesiums, so 
that the killing may go on. 



The War and the Future 73 

You may wonder what kind of a life is lived 
under such conditions. 

I can only say that it is a very attractive kind 
of life, and that most men who leave it 
want to go back to it, and few men who 
have lived that kind of life find it easy to set- 
tle down to another. And you will see men 
at their very best under those conditions. You 
will find them far more thoughtful of each 
other; far more generous and self-sacrificing 
than you will ever see them in time of peace. 
You will be among men who will die for you 
without a moment's thought or an instant's 
hesitation, and who will share their last food 
or drink with you. You will see dying men 
giving up their last breath to comfort some 
other wounded man who may be suffering more 
at the moment. And living among those men, 
sharing their hardships and their dangers, you 
will realize to the full the sense of brotherhood 
and the unity of life which are among the 
deepest feelings which can come to men. You 
will realize the gaiety, the courage and the 
heroism of the mind of man, and you will 
realize how deeply you love your fellows. 

A British oiBcer has defined the life at the 
front as " damned dull, damned dirty and 



74 The War and the Future 

damned dangerous." It is dull, because you 
stand in a gash in the earth behind some barbed 
wire and look through a thing called periscope 
at some more barbed wire two hundred yards 
away, beyond which, somewhere, is the enemy, 
whom you hardly ever see. Then when you 
have stood in the trench for a time, you are 
put to do some digging, and when you have 
done the digging you are put to dig something 
else, and when you have done that digging you 
are put to dig something else. And when you 
have finished digging for the time, you are put 
to carrying something heavy and awkward, and 
when you have carried that, you are given 
something else to carry, and when you have 
carried that, you are given something else to 
carry, and the next morning there will be plenty 
of other things to carry. The work of sol- 
diers today is not so much fighting, as digging 
trenches and roads and railways and wells. 
When they have finished digging, they have to 
carry up the heavy and awkward things needed 
at the front lines. Marshal Joffre said that 
this war is a war of carriers. The Battle of 
the Marne was won by us because the enemy 
carriers failed, and Verdun was saved to us be- 
cause the French carriers did not fail. All the 



The War and the Future 75 

things needed in the front line are heavy and 
awkward to carry, and all have to be carried 
up, on the shoulders of men. The image left 
on the minds of most men by this war is not an 
image of fighting, nor of men standing in the 
trenches, nor of attacks, nor even of the gun- 
ners at the guns; it is the image of little parties 
of men plodding along in single file through the 
mud, carrying up the things needed in the front 
trenches; barbed wire, trench gratings, trench 
pumps, machine guns, machine gun ammunition, 
bombs, Stokes shells, tins of bully beef and tins 
of water. And by the sides of the gratings 
which make the roads near the front you will 
see the graves of hundreds of men who have 
lost their lives in carrying up these things. 

And when it rains, as it has rained for weeks 
together on the Western front during the last 
three years, that task of carrying becomes in- 
finitely more terrible to the men than standing 
in the trenches to be killed or wounded. All 
that shot up field becomes a vast and waveless 
sea of mud. That mud has to be seen to be 
believed, it cannot be described. It is more 
dangerous than any quicksand. I have seen 
men and horses stuck in it, being pulled out 
with ropes. I have seen soldiers standing in 



76 The War and the Future 

it up to the waist, fast asleep, and I daresay you 
have seen that picture of the two soldiers stand- 
ing in it up to the chin, one of them saying to 
the other: " If we stay here much longer we 
shall be submarined." There Is nothing like 
this mud for breaking men's hearts. Any sol- 
dier on the Western front will tell you that the 
mud Is the real enemy. The task of carrying 
up supplies across that mud, becomes by much 
the most difficult task which soldiers are called 
upon to do. 

In spite of the danger and the occasional 
mud, the life at the front Is lived with cheer- 
fulness. There Is much joking, though many 
of the jokes are about death and the dead. 
Very strange and romantic things happen con- 
tinually, and there are strange escapes. I 
have not seen any escape quite so wonderful as 
that escape vouched for during your Civil War. 
The story goes that a soldier was sitting on the 
ground eating his supper. Between two mouth- 
fuls he suddenly leaped Into the air. While he 
was In the air, so the story goes, a cannon ball 
struck the ground where he had been sitting. 
He could not explain afterwards why It was 
that he jumped. I daresay that story Is true. 
I have not seen anything quite so wonderful as 



The War and the Future 77 

that, but I know of one very wonderful escape, 
in Gallipoli. A little party of friends sat to- 
gether at their dugout door, watching the men 
swimming on the beach under fire. The beach 
was continually under fire, but it was no more 
dangerous than the dry land, and as swimming 
was the only possible relaxation for the troops, 
they were allowed to swim. While they 
watched the swimmers, these friends saw a soli- 
tary soldier go into a dugout (some distance 
down the hill) and draw the sacking which 
served as a door. Evidently he was settling 
in for his siesta. About ten minutes later a 
big Turkish shell came over. There were three 
big Turkish guns which used to shell the beach. 
They were known as Beachy Bill, Asiatic An- 
nie, and Lousie Liza. A shell from one of 
these guns pitched (apparently) right onto the 
dugout into which this man had gone, and 
burst. The friends waited for a minute to see 
If another shell were coming near the same 
place, but the next shell pitched into the sea. 
They then went down to see if they could be of 
any service, though they expected to find the 
man blown to pieces. As they drew near to 
the wreck of the dugout, a perfectly naked man 
emerged, swearing. What had happened was 



78 The War and the Future 

this. He had gone into the dugout, had taken 
off all his clothes because it was very hot, and 
had lain down on his bed, which was a raised 
bank of earth, perhaps three feet above the 
level of the floor. The shell had come through 
the roof, had gone into the floor of the dugout, 
had dug a hole ten feet deep and had then 
burst. The hole and the raised bank of earth 
together had protected the man from the con- 
cussion and from the chunks of shell. He him- 
self was not touched. Everything which he 
possessed was blown into little flinders, and he 
was swearing because his afternoon sleep had 
been disturbed. 

In the same place, in Gallipoli, the day after 
the landing, the 26th of April, 19 15, an Aus- 
tralian Captain was with his platoon of men 
in a trench up the hill. An Australian Major 
suddenly appeared to this Captain and said: 
" Don't let your men fire to their front during 
the next half hour. An Indian working party 
has just gone up to your front, you will be hit- 
ting some of them." The Captain was a little 
puzzled at this, because he had seen no Indian 
working party, so he looked at the Major, and 
noticed that the Major's shoulder strap bore 
the number 31. That puzzled him, because 



The War and the Future 79 

he knew that only eighteen Australian bat- 
talions had landed on the Peninsula — Num- 
bers one to eighteen — and he did not under- 
stand what a member of the thirty-first battalion 
could be doing there. So he looked hard at 
this Major and said: "Say, are you Fair 
Dinkum?" That is an Australian slang 
phrase which means, " Are you the genuine 
thing? Are you quite all that you pretend to 
be?" The Major said: "Yes, I'm Major 
Fair Dinkum." 

At the inquest on Major Dinkum, they found 
that he had taken the uniform from a dead Ma- 
jor of the thirteenth battalion, and had been 
afraid to wear It just as it was, for fear of be- 
ing challenged, so he had reversed the numbers 
on the shoulder straps, and made them thirty- 
one. The inquest found that he died from lead 
in the head. 

A branch of the service which Is very little 
recognized but exceedingly dangerous is that 
branch of the messengers who carry messages 
and carrier pigeons and telephone wires during 
an attack. One of the most difficult things In 
modern war is to let your own side know ex- 
actly how far an attack has progressed. You 
send back messengers and the messengers are 



8o The War and the Future 

killed. You run out telephone wires and the 
wires are cut, as fast as they are laid, by shells 
or bullets. You send back carrier pigeons and 
the carrier pigeons are killed. During the 
Battle of the Somme a friend of mine was up 
in a tree correcting the fire of his battery. He 
had a telephone and a telescope. He watched 
the bursting of the shells and then telephoned 
back to the guns to correct their fire. While 
he was doing this, he glanced back at the Eng- 
lish lines, and saw a great enemy barrage 
bursting between himself and his friends, in a 
kind of wall of explosion. And hopping along 
through this barrage came one solitary English 
soldier, who paid no more attention to the shells 
than if they had been hail. He looked to see 
this man blown to pieces, but he wasn't blown 
to pieces; and then he saw that it was his own 
servant bringing a letter. He wondered what 
kind of a letter could be brought under such 
conditions, and what stirring thing made it 
necessary, so he climbed down the tree and took 
the letter and read it. The letter ran: " The 
Veterinary Surgeon-Major begs to report, that 
your old mare is suffering from a fit of the 
strangles." The servant saluted and said: 
"Any answer, sir?" And my friend said: 



The War and the Future 8i 

" No, no answer. Acknowledge." The serv- 
ant saluted and went back with the acknowledg- 
ment, hopping through the barrage as though 
perhaps it were a little wet, but not worth put- 
ting on a mackintosh for. 

There is another story told of a General 
(during an attack in the Battle of the Somme) 
who could not learn how far his division had 
gone. It was a matter of the most intense 
anxiety to him. He sent out messengers who 
never returned, the telephone wires were cut as 
fast as they were laid, and no pigeons came 
back. He stood beside the pigeon-loft biting 
his finger nails. Then at last, out of the battle, 
came a solitary pigeon, and the General cried: 
" There she is, there she is. Now we shall 
know." The pigeon came circling out of the 
smoke, and came down to the pigeon-loft and 
went in. The General said, " Go in, man, go 
in, and get the message ! " So the pigeon 
fancier went into the loft and was gone rather 
a long time, and the General cried: " Read 
it out, man, read it out. What do they say? " 
The man replied, " I'd rather not read it aloud, 
sir." The General said: ''Bring it here, 
man." The General took the message and 
read it, and the message ran: "I'm not go- 



82 The War and the Future 

ing to carry this bloody poultry any longer." 
I have said something about the dulness and 
the dirtiness of the life, but there is a kind of 
dirtiness to which I have not yet alluded. On 
your way up to the front you are struck by the 
number of soldiers sitting on the doorsteps of 
ruined houses studying the tails of their shirts 
as though they were precious manuscripts. 
When you are at the front you notice that the 
men have an uneasy way with their shoulders 
as though they wished to be scraping along 
brick walls, and when you have slept one night 
at the front you realize what the soldier meant 
when he wrote home to say: " This war isn't 
a very bloody war, so far as I've seen it, but it 
does tickle at night." I would like to ask all 
those who are sending packets of clothing to 
their friends at the front always to include the 
strongest insecticide they can find, because, 
though no insecticide is really strong enough to 
kill the creatures, a good strong insecticide will 
take the edge off them. The condition of need- 
ing insecticide is known as being *' chatty." 
Not long ago an English actress was playing to 
the soldiers in a base camp. She was playing 
a play of Barrie's, in which a lady says of her 
husband that he was so nice and " chatty." 



The War and the Future 83 

She was interrupted by a burst of joy from the 
troops. She could not understand what she 
had said to disturb them. 

Next as to the danger at the front. In pro- 
portion to the numbers engaged, this war is by 
much the least dangerous war of which we have 
any record. The great scourges of ancient 
armies, typhus fever, typhoid, smallpox and 
measles, have been practically eliminated from 
this war. The only outbreak of typhus, so 
far as I know, was the outbreak in Serbia in 
19 1 5, and that was due not to the soldiers, but 
to the filthy conditions in which the Serbian 
refugees were forced to live. A friend of 
mine, a Doctor, was in charge of a hospital 
during that epidemic. The hospital was a big 
church which was completely filled with misery 
of every sort; typhus cases, typhoid cases, 
smallpox cases, maternity cases and children 
with measles, all jammed up together, and no- 
body to look after them but my friend and a 
few Austrian prisoners. The place was very 
filthy, crawling with vermin, and pretty nearly 
every known language was spoken there. One 
day a strange man appeared on the scene of 
misery. The orderlies asked my friend what 
they should do with him. My friend looked 



84 The War and the Future 

d.t the man, and saw that he was pale and 
shaggy, so he said, " Just wash him and put 
him into one of the beds." So they washed 
him. He protested very vigorously, but they 
did it, and they put him into one of the beds. 
He protested very vigorously against that, but 
they put him in and kept him there. My 
friend, being very busy, was not able to see him 
for the rest of the day, and didn't get round to 
him until the next morning. Then he found 
that he wasn't sick at all, but had come with a 
message from some neighbouring hospital. 

As to the danger from missiles at the front, 
it is true, that at any minute of the day or night, 
in any part of the Army Zone, you may be- 
come a casualty, and the thing which makes you 
a casualty may bury you as well, or blow you 
into such small fragments that nothing of you 
may ever be seen again, nor anybody know 
what has become of you. Even if you are 
away from the front, on some battlefield where 
there has been no fighting for months, you are 
still in danger, because the ground is littered 
with explosives in a more or less dangerous con- 
dition. There are bombs which are going off 
because their safety pins have rusted through, 
and shells which go off for no apparent cause. 



The War and the Future 85 

You may jump across an open trench and land 
on a percussion bomb and kill yourself, or you 
may be riding along, and your horse may kick 
a percussion bomb and kill you. Or you may 
meet a souvenir hunter who will be equally 
deadly. And then some soldiers love to collect 
shells which have not exploded and then light 
fires under them for the pleasure of hearing 
them go Bang! They love to collect bombs 
and fling them at targets for their amusement. 
Last summer a General was walking on the 
old battlefield, when he heard a noise of cheer- 
ing. There came a Bang, and bits of shrapnel 
came flying past. Then there came another 
cheer, and another Bang and some more shrap- 
nel. So, guessing what was the matter, he 
jumped up onto the trench parapet and looked 
down. There he saw a burly soldier who had 
rigged up a target to represent a German and 
was bowling Mills bombs at it. At each bomb 
he shouted out: " Every time you hit you get 
a good cigar!" The General jumped onto 
this man and said: " Here, what are you do- 
ing? Don't you know that's against orders? " 
The man turned up the face of an Innocent child 
and said : '' No sir." '' Well," said the Gen- 
eral, " at least you know it's very dangerous, 



86 The War and the Future 

don't you? " The man looked at the General 
and sized him up, and said, " Yes, General. 
That's just why I was doing it, sir. You know, 
sir, I'm a family man, sir. I daresay you are 
yourself, sir. And I was thinking, in a little 
while the little children will be coming back to 
these old battlefields. They won't know what 
these cruel bombs are, sir, they'll go playing 
with them, poor little things, sir, and they'll 
blow off their little arms, sir, and their little 
legs, sir. Then think of their poor mothers' 
feelings. So I just collected these few bombs, 
sir, really In order to save those little children, 
sir." So he was acquitted as a philanthropist. 
While I am on the subject of bombs, I may 
say what happened to a boy of the Gloucester 
Battalion In Gallipoll. The boy was an agri- 
cultural laborer before the war and rather 
stronger In the arm than In the head. A friend 
came to his mother and said: ^' Oh, Mrs. 
Brown, what news have you of Bert? " Mrs. 
Brown beamed all over her face and said: 
" Oh, our Bert, he have had a narrow escape. 
He was In Gallipoll and there come a Turk 
and flung one of they bombs, and the bomb 
fell just at our Bert's feet, but our Bert he 
never hesitate, he pick it up, and he flung it 



The War and the Future 87 

right to the other end of the trench, and it burst 
just as it got there. It killed two of our Bert's 
best friends, but if our Bert hadn't flung it just 
when he done, it would have killed our Bert." 

During the course of this war some six or 
seven millions of men have been drawn into 
the English Army from every rank of society, 
and have submitted to a pretty rough test. Un- 
der that test, thousands of men, who had had 
no opportunity of showing what was in them 
in time of peace, have risen to positions of 
great dignity, trust and authority. And as a 
result, the Army today is a thoroughly demo- 
cratic thing. At the beginning of the war it 
was not so. I know of a case, in which a rich 
man enlisted with his shepherd. He told the 
shepherd, when he enlisted, " Of course, I shall 
pay your wages as my shepherd all the time 
that we are serving." When they were In the 
Battalion the shepherd soon proved himself to 
be the better man. The shepherd became a 
Sergeant and his master remained a private. 
Presently, the master did something wrong and 
the shepherd had him up and got him ten days* 
fatigue. As he left the court, the master leaned 
over to the shepherd and said: " Your wages 
are stopped for these ten days." That was in 



88 The War and the Future 

the early days of the war, when the democratic 
leaven was not working very well. But it is 
working very well today. I know of a case of 
a young man who began life as a stable boy in a 
racing stable. He didn't like the life, so he 
became a carpenter; he was a carpenter when 
the war began. He enlisted In a cavalry regi- 
ment, because he was very fond of horses; and 
as he knew a great deal about the management 
of horses he was given a commission straight- 
away. He was always a man of great good 
temper and charm and tact in dealing with other 
men. He soon rose to a Captain. He went 
to France with the battalion, served in the 
trenches, dismounted, and soon rose to be Colo- 
nel of the battalion. He handled the battalion 
with great distinction and was made a Briga- 
dier-General, and he is a Brigadier-General 
today. 

Last summer I was talking with a General 
about the war, and he said: " Guess what my 
best staff officer was before the war?" I 
couldn't guess. He said he was a barber's as- 
sistant. " Now what do you think my second 
best staff officer was before the war? " Again 
I couldn't guess. He said, " He was a milk- 
man's assistant and went round with the milk 



The War and the Future 89 

cans In the morning. Now what do you think 
my third best staff officer was before the war? 
He's the bravest man I've got." Again I could 
not guess. He said, " He was a milHner's as- 
sistant, and sold ribbons over the counter." 

When the war is over and these men are dis- 
banded back into every rank of society, they 
will carry with them this democratic leaven. I 
am quite sure that England, after the war, will 
be as democratic a country as this country or 
France. 

If you turn your back upon the Army Zone 
and walk into the green and pleasant parts of 
France, you will notice that every big building 
in France Is flying a Red Cross flag, for every 
big building now in France is a hospital. The 
business of the care of the wounded Is a bigger 
business than coal or cotton or steel In time of 
peace. There are hundreds of thousands of 
orderlies and nurses and all the picked surgeons 
of the world looking after the wounded. 
There are miles of Red Cross trains carrying 
wounded, and there are more ships carrying 
wounded than carried passengers between Eng- 
land and America in the time of peace. I 
should like to tell you of one or two things 



90 The War and the Future 

which have been done to better the lot of the 
wounded. Firstly, about facial surgery. In 
this war of high explosives it often happens 
that men will be brought in with all their faces 
blown away, with practically no face left be- 
neath their brows, their noses gone, their 
cheeks gone, their jaws and their tongues gone. 
In the old days, if those men had survived at 
all, they could only have survived as objects 
of pity and horror and disgust. But today the 
facial surgeon steps in and re-makes their faces. 
The facial surgeon begins by taking a bone from 
the man's leg. Out of that bone they model 
him a new jaw-bone, which they graft onto the 
stumps of the old. Then cunning artists model 
him a new palate and a new set of teeth. Then, 
bit by bit, they begin to make him new cheeks. 
They get little bits of skin from the man's arm, 
and other little bits from volunteers, and they 
graft these on to what was left of the man's 
cheeks. Though it takes a long time to do, 
they do at last make complete cheeks. Then 
they take a part of a sheep's tongue and graft 
it on to the roots of the man's tongue, so that it 
grows. Then they add artificial lips, an arti- 
ficial nose, and whiskers, beard and moustaches, 
if the man chooses. They turn the man out, 



The War and the Future 91 

oftener handsomer than he ever was before, 
able to talk, and to earn his own living on equal 
terms with his fellowmen. In all that work of 
facial surgery the American surgeons have set a 
standard for the rest of the world. What 
they have done is amazing. You can see the 
men brought in, looking like nothing human, 
looking like bloody mops on the ends of sticks. 
Gradually you see them becoming human and 
at last becoming handsome and at last almost 
indistinguishable from their fellows. Surgeons 
not only restore the men fresh from the battle- 
field, but they remake the faces of those who 
have been badly patched up in distant parts of 
this war, such as Mesopotamia, where special 
treatment has been Impossible, and though this 
re-making takes a very long time. It can still be 
done. 

Another very wonderful treatment Is the 
treatment of the burned men. In this war of 
high explosives and flame projectors many men 
are shockingly burned. You may see men 
brought In with practically no skin on them 
above their waist, unable to rest, and suffer- 
ing torments. They apply the new treatment 
of Ambrene to these sufferers. Ambrene Is 
said to be a by-product of paraffin mixed with 



92 The War and the Future 

resin and with amber. It is applied in a liquid 
form with a camel's hair brush. Directly it 
touches the burned surface all pain ceases and 
the man is able to rest. In a fortnight the man 
has an entirely new skin, with no scar and prac- 
tically no discoloration, and he is able to go 
back to the trenches, often much disgusted at 
being cured so soon. 

When you have seen the wounded you have 
seen the fruits of this business. And when you 
have seen the wounded you resolve within your- 
self that at whatever cost this must be the last 
war of this kind. This war is being fought to- 
day in order that it may be the last war of its 
kind. If we succeed in this, as we shall, all the 
bloodshed and horror and misery of this war 
will have been very well worth while. But even 
when we have gotten rid of the causes of this 
T/ar, there will still remain, in all human socie- 
ties, many potential causes of war. A great 
deal of cant is talked about war. In all com- 
mercial countries there must be some manufac- 
turers who make things that will be of great 
demand in war, and it is an unfortunate fact 
that after long periods of peace men begin to 
think a great deal about war, to read about it, 
and to brood upon it, and even to long for it, so 



The War and the Future 93 

that they may have that deep experience for 
themselves. And to many young men war is 
exceedingly delightful. It gives them adven- 
ture, excitement and comradeship. Only the 
other day a young English soldier said to me; 
" Do you think this lovely war will ever come 
to an end?" I said I hoped it would, some 
day. And he said, " Well, I don't know what 
I shall do when it comes to an end. It will 
break my heart. I've had the time of my life." 
That boy was not quite nineteen. He had been 
a school-boy six months before. He had been 
badly wounded three weeks before. He had 
been at death's door a fortnight before. He 
had made an amazing recovery and was pant- 
ing to get back. There are hundreds of thou- 
sand of young men like that, who thoroughly en- 
joy every minute of it. The older men do not 
view war with quite such enthusiasm. Their 
attitude, perhaps, is much like that of the 
Naval Officer who said the other day: *' I do 
wish to God this war would end, so that I could 
get the men back to battle practice." 

Even if we were able to be rid of all these 
potential causes of war we should not get rid 
of evil in this world, and as long as men can be 
evil, evil men will strike for power, and the 



94 The War and the Future 

only way to resist evil men, when they do evil 
things, is to use force to them. It often needs 
a very great deal of force. 

Yet when people ask me if I think that wars 
will cease to be, I always say that I do, because 
the evil things in this world do get knocked on 
the head. The dragons and basilisks and 
cockatrices have become extinct, and most mur- 
derers get hanged, and most lunatics get locked 
up; and men are coming more and more to see 
that certain evils that afflict life are not inevit- 
able, and are not the will of God, but are simply 
the result of obsolete and stupid ways of think- 
ing and of governing. It ought to be possible 
for the mind of man, which made the steam 
engine, the submarine and the aeroplane, and 
conquered the Black Death and yellow fever 
and typhus fever, to devise some means of 
living, nation with nation, without this peri- 
odical slaughter known as war. It won't be 
easy to devise any such means, men being what 
they are, with the instincts for war deeply 
rooted in their hearts, or easily put there by 
their rulers; yet the mind of man can do most 
things, if he can only get the will to do them. 

Even before this war, when most men were 
either unoccupied or occupied only in the grim 



The War and the Future 95 

and stupid devilry of plotting and preparing 
war; men tried to limit and prevent war, the 
Hague Conferences did sit. They didn't limit 
or prevent war, because they were not meant to. 
While they sat, one great power was doubling 
its army, and a second was doubling its strate- 
gic railways, and a third was increasing its 
navy, and all were afraid, each of the other. 
How could peace come from men under those 
conditions? 

Then, though they made recommendations, 
the Hague delegates had no power to enforce 
them. They knew this when they made them. 
Their recommendations were therefore not 
forceful. They seemed to say, that war is in- 
evitable, let us temper its horror. They did 
not say, war has no business in modern life, 
henceforth those who make war shall be treated 
as criminals by an international police. 

They could not say that, but the Peace Dele- 
gates of the future will have to say it. If there 
Is to be any future. And after this war men 
will listen to them if they do say it, for after 
this war men will passionately want to limit 
and prevent war. They know now, that the 
devil of war, which they fed with their arro- 
gance, their envy, their strength and their stu- 



96 The War and the Future 

pidlty, is an overwhelming monster which eats 
them wholesale. 

Not long ago, I was talking to an American 
about this ending of war by internationalism. 
He said: " If two great peoples would agree 
to it, it could be done ; and if your country and 
mine would agree to it, it would be done." 
Don't think me a dreamer, an idealist, a pacifist. 
I am for the common man and woman, whose 
tears and blood pay for war. And in that mat- 
ter of payment, the poor German pays, equally 
with the poor Belgian. He pays with all he 
has. On the battlefields of this war I have seen 
the men who paid. I have seen enemy dead, 
and Turk dead, and French dead, and English 
dead, and every dead man meant some woman 
with a broken heart. 

Those men had no quarrel with each other. 
They lie there in the mud, because man, who 
has conquered the black death and typhus and 
smallpox, and the yellow fever, has not con- 
quered the war fever. And the war fever takes 
him in the blood and in the soul and kills him 
by the hundred thousand. 

When the blessed bells ring for peace, this 
year or next year, in man's time if not in ours. 



The War and the Future 97 

it may be possible to remake the ways of na- 
tional life more in accordance with man's place 
in the universe. When that time comes, 
France, this country, and England, the three 
countries which have done the most for liberty, 
will have deciding voices in that remaking. 
They will be able to declare in what ways of 
freedom the men and women of the future will 
walk. I trust that our three great nations may 
be able to substitute some co-operating system 
of internationalism for the competing national- 
ism which led to the present bonfire. 

And when that time comes, I hope that one 
other thing may be possible. I hope that my 
people, the English, may, as your comrades m 
this war, do something or be something or be- 
come something which will atone in some meas- 
ure for the wrongs we did to you in the past, 
and for the misunderstandings which have 
arisen between us since then. I'm afraid that 
the memory of those old wrongs may never 
pass, for nations, like people, do not forget 
their childhood. Yet I hope for the sake of the 
world, that it may be set aside, so that your 
country and mine, which have one great key to 
understanding, which other nations have not, 



98 The War and the Future 

the same language, may, after this time of war 
work like friends together, to make wars to 
cease upon this earth. 



PRINTED IN THE XTNITBD STATES OF AMERICA 



HE following pages contain advertisements of Mac- 
millan books by the same author. 



THE WORKS OF JOHN MASBPiELD 

Gallipoli 

"This is a miniature epic, or saga, its eloquent but un- 
forced prose making it a book that will stand high among 
Alasefield's productions. . . . Masefield writes of the mili- 
tary aspect of the campaign with a rare facility for pic- 
torial expression ... a splendid story of bravery splen- 
didly told." — New York Evening Post. 

The Old Front Line 

Illustrated. Cloth, ismo. $i.oo 

What Mr. Masefield did for the Gallipoli Campaign, he 
now does for the Campaign in France. His subject is the 
old front line as it was when the battle of the Somme be- 
gan. His account is vivid and gripping — a huge conflict 
seen through the eyes of a great poet, this is the book. 

Good Friday and Other Poems 

By JOHN MASEFIELD 

Cloth, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 

"Reveals an interesting development in poetic thought 
and expression ... a new Masefield . . . who has never 
written with more dignity, nor with more artistry. Those 
who go in quest of Beauty will find her here. . . . Here is 
beauty of impression, beauty of expression, beauty of 
thought, and beauty of phrase."— The New York Times. 

The Story of a Round-House, 
and Other Poems 

New and revised edition, $1.30. Leather, $1.75 

"The story of that rounding of the Horn! Never in prose has 
the sea been so tremendously described." — Chicago Evening Post. 

" Masefield has prisoned in verse the spirit of life at sea." — N. Y. 
Sun. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64r-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



THE WORKS OP JOHN MASEFIBLD 

The Everlasting Mercy and 
The Widow in the Bye Street 

(Awarded the Royal Society of Literature's prize of $500) 

New and revised edition, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 

" Mr. Masefield comes like a flash of light across contemporary 
English poetry. The improbable has been accomplished; he has 
made poetry out of the very material that has refused to yield it for 
almost a score of years." — Boston Evening Transcript. 

" A vigour and sincerity rare in modem English literature."— 
The Independent. 

Philip the King, and Other Poems 

Cloth, j2mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 

" Mr. Masefield has never done anything better than these 
poems." — Argonaut. 

Lollingdon Downs and Other Poems 

$1.25 

A new book of poems by Mr. Masefield, containing his 
most recent work in verse. The same beauty of expres- 
sion and impression which pervaded his earlier poetry will 
be found in the pages of " Lollingdon Downs and Other 
Poems." These latest of Mr. Masefield's poems are issued 
in a limited edition. 



The Daffodil Fields 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 

" Neither in the design nor in the telling did or could ' Enoch 
Arden * come near the artistic truth of ' The Daffodil Fields.' " — 
Sir Quiller-Couch. Cambridge University. 

Salt Water Poems and Ballads 

Illustrated. $2.00 

"The salt of the sea is in these jingles not the mystic sea of the 
older poets who had an art, but the hard sea that men fight, even 
in these days of leviathan liners, in stout-timbered hulls with blocks 
to rattle and hemp for the gale to whistle through and give the salt- 
lipped chantey man his rugged meters." — New York Sun. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



THE WORKS OF JOHN MASBFIBLD 

A Mainsail Haul 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 
As a sailor before the mast Masefield has traveled the 
world over. Many of the tales in this volume are his own 
experiences written with the same dramatic fidelity dis- 
played in " Dauber." 

Multitude and Solitude 

" This is material of the best kind for a story of adventure, and 
Mr. Masefield uses it to the best advantage. He has the gift of 
direct and simple narrative, and it need hardly be said that he 
knows the human heart." — Argonaut. 



Captain Margaret 

Cloth, $1.50 

" Worthy to rank high among books of its class. The story has 
quality, charm, and spirited narrative." — Outlook. 



Lost Endeavour 

$1.50 

A stirring story of adventure, dealing with pirates and 
buccaneers, and life on the seas in a day when an ocean 
trip was beset with all kinds of dangers and excitements. 
Those who have enjoyed "Captain Margaret" and "Mul- 
titude and Solitude " will find this tale equally exhilarating. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



THB WORKS OF JOHN MASEFIELD 

The Tragedy of Pompey 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 

A play such as only the author of " Nan " could have 
written. Tense in situation and impressive in its poetry it 
conveys Masefield's genius in the handling of the dramatic 
form. 

The Faithful: A Tragedy in Three Acts 

Cloth, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 

"A striking drama ... a notable work that will meet with the 
hearty appreciation of discerning readers." — The Nation. 



The Tragedy of Nan 

New edition. Cloth, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 

*' One of the most distinctive tragedies written by a dramatist of 
the modern school." — A'^. Y. Evening Post, 



The Locked Chest, and the Sweeps of 
Ninety-Eight 

$1-^5 

The place of Mr. Masefield as a dramatist has been 
amply proved by the plays which he has published hitherto. 
In the realm of the one-act play he is seen to quite as good 
effect as in the longer work, and this volume ranks with 
his best. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



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